LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Si 

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I UNITED STATES OP AMERICA. {| 



THE VEDDER LECTURES, 1876. 



THE PSALTER 



A WITNESS 



DIVINE ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE. 



BY 



TALBOT W. CHAMBERS, D.D., 

ONE OF THE PASTORS OF THE COLLEGIATE DUICH CHURCH OF NEW YORK. 




NEW YORK: 
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY, 

9OO BROADWAY, COR. 20th ST. 

1876. 

rx 



4"5o 
£.4- 



Copyright, 1876, by 
Anson D. F. Randolph & Company. 




ROBERT RUTTER, 
BINDER, 

84 BEEKMAN STREET, N. Y. 



EDWARD 0. JENKINS, 
PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER, 

20 NORTH WILLIAM ST., N. Y. 



PREFACE 



This volume consists of a course of lectures de- 
livered before the Theological Seminary and Rut- 
gers College, New Brunswick, N. J., in the months 
of April and May last. The General Synod of the 
Reformed Dutch Church having seen fit to appoint 
the author to be Lecturer, on the Vedder Founda- 
tion, at a time when he was out of the country, and 
had neither expressed nor felt any wish on the sub- 
ject, he felt constrained to accept the position, not- 
withstanding the fact that the pecuniary support of 
the Foundation had totally failed. The general sub- 
ject of. the lectureship is stated by the founder to be, 
" The present aspects of Modern Infidelity, in- 
cluding its cause and cure." The best "cure " of 
Infidelity is the study of the sacred volume which 
it rejects. With a view to promote this, the author 
selected a theme in the line of his recent studies, 
and treated it to the best of his ability. He is not 
aware that the argument here set forth has ever been 
handled in any separate volume. If, as thus pre- 
sented, it shall satisfy any wavering minds, or if 
it shall prompt abler writers to a fuller and more 
convincing discussion of its varied aspects, he 
will be abundantly content. 

New York, September, 1876. 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

LECTURE I. 

Introductory : The Nature of the Psalter. . . i 



LECTURE II. 
The Doctrine of God in the Psalter 37 

LECTURE III. 
The Doctrine of Man in the Psalter 73 

LECTURE IV. 
The Messiah and the Future Life 113 

LECTURE V. 
The Ethics of the Psalter 149 



LECTURE I. 

INTRODUCTORY. THE NATURE AND CHARACTER- 
ISTICS OF THE PSALTER. 



LECTURE I. 



INTRODUCTION. 

FORMS OF MODERN INFIDELITY — AGREE IN REJECTING 
THE SCRIPTURES — NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE METHODS OF 
DEFENCE — LATTER PREFERRED — THE PROPOSITION STATED 
— THE PSALTER CHOSEN BECAUSE IT BELONGS TO THE OLD 
TESTAMENT — BECAUSE SPONTANEOUS — BECAUSE SPIRIT- 
UAL — NATURE OF THE BOOK — ITS CONTENTS — AUTHORS — 
DATES — CLASSIFICATION — THE FIVE BOOKS — MOURNFUL 
— JOYFUL — DIDACTIC — GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS — I . 
POETICAL — PECULIARITIES OF FORM — 2. LYRICAL — 3. PAL- 
ESTINIAN— 4. TRUE— I04TH PSALM — l8TH PSALM — THE 
ARGUMENT a fortiori. 

THE forms of modern infidelity differ widely 
among themselves, sometimes assailing 
single characteristic features of revealed truth ; 
at others laying the axe at the root of all super- 
natural religion. The hottest controversy of 
the last half century had respect to the person 
of our Lord. The answers to His own weighty 
and searching question, "What think ye of 
Christ ? " have declared that He was an inten- 
tional deceiver, or a victim of His own self-de- 



2 THE PSALTER. 

ception and enthusiasm, or an invention of His 
disciples and biographers, or a final result of 
mythical traditions gradually taking shape in an 
unintelligent age — all these being simply so 
many different ways of rejecting His own state- 
ment that He is the Son of the living God, and 
the Saviour of the world. Another form of the 
prevalent skepticism of our day is found in what 
the apostle once spoke of as " the oppositions of 
science falsely so called." This is not content 
with attacking some one great truth or fact as- 
serted in our holy religion, such as the fall of 
man, the unity of the race, the occurrence of 
the deluge, or the resurrection of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, but cuts away the ground from 
under supernaturalism by insisting upon an ab- 
solute and unvarying uniformity in the sequences 
of nature from the very beginning. This theory 
of the unchangeableness of natural laws rules 
out revelation entirely, and remands us back to 
our own discoveries in the search for moral and 
religious truth. 

Both these forms of error — the denial of the 
Lord Jesus, and the denial of the possibility of 
divine intervention in the processes of nature — 
agree in rejecting the Scripture as unworthy of 
trust because it states what is not true. Hence 



INTRODUCTORY. 3 

the pivot of the whole argument lies in the 
question, Is there a revelation come from 
God ? or in other words, Is the Bible such a 
revelation ? For however loosely men may 
talk of the different Scriptures of the ancient 
races as alike in character and authority, no se- 
rious person will undertake to set up any other 
professedly holy or divine book in competition 
with the lively oracles of God. The Vedas of 
the Brahmans, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists, 
the Avestan of the Parsis, the Koran of the 
Mohammedans claim to be divine, and are so 
regarded by their respective followers. But 
who now thinks of admitting the claim ? These 
writings are all truly remarkable. They con- 
tain many striking thoughts, brilliant pictures, 
and glorious visions. Detached statements are 
found here and there which challenge universal 
admiration. But they lack not only in part, but 
altogether, the distinctive evidence of a revela- 
tion. They offer no specifications of time and 
place and circumstances to which the ordinary 
historical tests can be applied. Their warmest 
advocates claim for them no external evidences 
whatever. And when subjectively considered, 
these writings as a whole are found to be pecul- 
iarly local and national, not even pretending to 



4 THE PSALTER. 

that universality of meaning and application 
which must belong to a communication by God 
to man. 

If anywhere on earth there is an authen- 
tic message from heaven, it must be in the Old 
Testament and the New. The argument to 
show that it is there may be conducted in two 
ways. One, the negative, takes up in detail 
the various objections which have been urged, 
and shows their unsoundness. This method 
-has been pursued from the beginning in every 
age of the Church, indeed so extensively as to 
have given its name to the whole department 
of Christian evidences, which is now commonly 
known as Apologetics. The successful prosecu- 
tion of this work demands time and space 
largely. Take, for example, the difficulties based 
on the discoveries of physical science. Much 
patience and learning are required to follow 
scientists through their elaborate investigation 
and argumentation, and carefully discriminate 
fact from theory, separating what is proved 
from what is inferred or conjectured. And 
when this is successfully done, there is often 
needed a special training in the hearer or reader 
to fit him to see the point of the objection or 
the force of the reply. And, besides, when 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 5 

one class of difficulties has been removed, all 
the others resting upon different grounds still 
remain to be taken up in turn and disproved. 

The other method, therefore, the positive, 
that which considers and sets forth the grounds 
upon which our faith in the Bible as the Word 
of God rests, is both more complete and more 
satisfactory. It is true that the lines of argu- 
ment are many, for it could not be otherwise in 
a book which is so large and varied in its con- 
tents, its history, and its relations to men. But 
each line of argument, if satisfactorily main- 
tained, is not only good for itself, but concludes 
in favor of the whole. For example, if the 
miraculous attestations are made out to be what 
they profess, and God has actually set His seal 
to the written word, then the Bible is true, and 
all the other evidences, such as those drawn 
from the fulfilment of prophecy, from the sub- 
stance of the Bible, from its purity and har- 
mony, its truth to human nature, its benign in- 
fluence upon the individual, the family, and the 
State, the rapid propagation of its faith, and 
the like, are also true, and give the argument 
cumulative force. And so with any one of 
these compared with the rest. Truth is the 
same always and everywhere. A revelation 



6 THE P SALTER/ 

which is true historically must be also true on 
all other grounds, theoretical or practical. Mil- 
ton, in his Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 
mentions the Egyptian fable that " Typhon with 
his conspirators took the virgin Truth, hewed 
her lovely form into a thousand pieces and scat- 
tered them to the four winds," from which time 
her sad friends have gone up and down in care- 
ful search, "gathering up limb by limb still as 
they could find them/' But the dissevered 
pieces must needs make one whole, and each as 
it turned up was a pledge of the existence of 
the rest. And so each successful argument for 
the supreme truth interlocks with all the others 
and carries them along with it. As Hooker 
says, " Truth, of what kind soever, is by no kind 
of truth gainsaid." 

If a choice is to be made among the various 
methods of sustaining the faith, I quite agree 
with the sentiment expressed in the previous 
course of lectures on this foundation by Dr. 
Tayler Lewis: "The Bible itself must be 
brought out as the best defence against infidel- 
ity — the Bible itself, not only as the great 
standing miracle of history, but as containing un- 
earthly ideas for which no philosophy, no theory 
of development can ever account Other 



IN TROD UC TOR Y. 7 

defences are indeed important, but without this 
they are shorn of the great strength which can 
alone make them available to the pulling down 
of strongholds, and the overthrow of the truth's 
unwearied foes." A further reason for taking 
this course is found in the fact that the most in- 
teresting branch of Apologetics to ordinary 
readers, and especially to devout Christians, is 
that which treats of the Scripture's own claims 
for what it is, in and of itself. This is a port- 
able manual of the evidences always at hand, 
and always available for an answ r er to them that 
ask a reason of the hope that is in us. But the 
whole Bible, or even one Testament, is far too 
large for a course of lectures like this. I have 
chosen, therefore, to take up a single book, one 
that is complete in itself, and yet stands in vital 
relation to all the rest, viz.: the Psalms. The 
proposition is that these Psalms as a whole, 
when viewed as to their subjects, aims, spirit, 
and teaching, especially in comparison with the 
corresponding literature of all other forms of 
religion, can be accounted for on no other ground 
than a divine origin. 

This theme is selected because, first, it be- 
longs to the Old Testament, which is always 
more sharply assailed than the New, and which, 



8 " •* THE PSALTER. 

as the introductory portion of a gradual revela- 
tion, for that very reason stands the more open 
to hostile criticism. Hence it follows that if 
a constituent part of that which is professedly 
an incomplete and preparatory disclosure of the 
divine will can be substantiated on independent 
grounds, much more may that which belongs to 
the full and final statement of God's Word. 
The timidity of some Christian writers on this 
point is unaccountable. They seem to speak 
of the Hebrew Scriptures as if they were a bur- 
den to carry. How much nobler and truer is 
the language of the accomplished and genial 
critic, Herder, in the preface to his Geist der 
Ebraische Poesie : "The basis of theology is 
the Bible, and that of the New Testament is 
the Old. It is impossible to understand the 
former aright without a previous understanding 
of the latter ; for Christianity proceeded from 
Judaism, and the genius of the language is in 
both books the same. And this genius of the 
language we can nowhere study better — that is, 
with more truth, comprehensiveness, and satis- 
faction — than in its poetry, and, indeed, as far as 
possible, in its most ancient poetry. It pro- 
duces a false impression and misleads the young 
theologian to commend to him the New Testa- 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. g 

ment to the exclusion of the Old. Without 
this that can never be understood in a satis- 
factory manner. In the Old Testament we 
find as an aid to this a rich interchange of his- 
tory, of figurative representation, of characters, 
and of scenery ; and we see in it the many-col- 
ored dawn, the beautiful going forth of the sun 
in his milder radiance. In the New Testament 
it stands in the highest heavens and in merid- 
ian splendor, and every one knows which period 
of the day to the natural eye imparts most life 
and strength."* 

The spontaneous character of the Psalms 
gives a further reason for selecting them. They 
are thus sharply defined and discriminated from 
the most of the other writings with which they 
are connected. Every reader at once recog- 
nizes the difference between a chapter of moral 
or ceremonial precepts, or a historical narrative 
or a logical argument, and the outburst of pas- 
sion or sentiment which gives character to a 
poetical utterance, especially when it takes the 
form of a lyric. In the latter there is a buoy- 
ancy of life, a freshness of feeling not seen 
elsewhere. The singer has his tongue unloosed 



* Marsh's Translation, I., 22. 
1* 



IO THE PSALTER. 

from every bond, and under some overmaster- 
ing impulse pours out what he sees and feels. 
He pursues no course of consecutive reasoning, 
draws no nice distinctions, elaborates no specu- 
lative theme, but simply utters, in such phrase 
as the place and the time suggest, that which 
deeply stirs his own heart. Consequently all 
is free, unstudied/ natural. Even where the 
conceptions are most sublime, or the images 
most striking, or the words most felicitous, art 
lingers behind nature, and we feel ourselves in 
the presence of a soul moved to its depths. If, 
now, it can be shown that in such passionate 
utterances as these which arouse and express 

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 

that even amid the highest flights of imagina- 
tion, and a very whirlwind of contending feelings, 
there is yet an element truly divine that domi- 
nates the whole and separates it by an impassa- 
ble gulf from all other poetry, ancient or modern, 
the conclusion holds good not only for the 
Psalter, but for the entire volume of which it is 
an integral part. 

Another attractive feature of the Psalms for 
the present purpose is their spiritual character. 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 1 1 

They are wonderful not only for their antiquity, 
their variety, their simplicity, their frequent sub- 
limity, pathos, tenderness, and fire, but also for 
a peculiar development of thought and feeling. 
They acquaint us with the interior life of the 
Old Testament saints ; they disclose to us their 
feelings in the most sacred and hallowed mo- 
ments of their lives ; they give us a deep insight 
into the more hidden wonders of a holy religion, 
showing how our common humanity is affected 
under the experimental application of a true and 
self-consistent theology. Other parts of the 
Old Testament furnish the didactic statements 
of religious truth, its precepts or its promises, or 
its illustration in history or biography ; but in 
the Psalter we come close to the beating heart 
of the believer ; we see the actings of the whole 
moral nature in the presence of vivid, spiritual 
realities ; we trace the working of faith, and 
hope, and gratitude, or of shame, and fear, and 
penitence ; we follow the entire course of spir- 
itual vicissitudes in the dealings of the individual 
soul with its Maker and Portion ; in short, there 
is a perfect mirror of the devout man's inward 
life. Hence it is that so often the Psalms and 
the New Testament are bound up in the same 
volume, and lie on the table or the pillow of 



I2 THE PSALTER. 

many an humble Christian for whom the poetic 
power, the lyric fire, the graceful allusions, and 
the vivid imagery have little or no charm, but 
who sees in the picture of soul conflicts, of lowly 
abasement, of penitential confession, of rapt 
adoration, of clinging faith and sacred joy, the 
very stimulus and comfort his own situation 
requires. Doctrine and duty are translated 
before his eyes into experience, and the tran- 
script goes straight to his heart. Utterances 
made thousands of years ago in the Cave of 
Adullam or in the courts of the temple, are as 
fresh and life-like to his apprehension as if they 
originated but yesterday in his own land. If 
this be the fact — and how can it for an instant 
be doubted? — in dealing with the Psalter we 
are not at work upon the outposts, but in the 
citadel of Revelation, at close quarters with the 
very secret of its strength. Its acknowledged 
excellence in this respect, its fidelity to the in- 
tuitive instincts of enlightened souls, unmarred 
by the excesses of superstition or enthusiasm, 
require us to seek its origin higher than on the 
plane of this earth. 

What, then, is the Psalter ? In the form in 
which it stands in our Bibles — a form which can 



INTRODUCTORY. 



13 



be conclusively traced back to the middle of the 
third century before Christ — it is. a collection of 
one hundred and fifty lyrics, marked by very 
great differences among themselves, yet on the 
other hand united by certain features which they 
have in common. The differences are patent 
on even a superficial inspection. For example, 
in the matter of length they vary from one of 
two sentences (cxvii.) to one of a hundred and 
seventy-six (cxix.) ; and between these two 
extremes there is a constant diversity, denoting 
the absence of any prescribed pattern. The 
authors, too, are various. Although the book 
is commonly called the Psalms of David, yet he 
is the recognized author of only seventy-three, 
a little less than one-half of the whole. Still 
the title is justly given, since he was probably 
the composer of others, and the entire book 
evidently took its characteristic features and 
tone from him. More than fifty psalms are 
anonymous, while twelve are assigned to Asaph, 
eleven to the sons of Korah, two to Solomon, 
one to Ethan, and one to Moses, the man of 
God. The oldest known division of the collec- 
tion is into Five Books, terminating respectively 
with Pss. xli., lxxii., lxxxix., cvi., and cl. These 
books are separated and distinguished from 



14 



THE PSALTER. 



each other by the doxologies with which they 
severally conclude, by the greater or less use of 
one or other of the divine names, and by a 
general progress from doctrine and experience 
in the First, through historical and didactic 
utterances in the Second and Third, to a domi- 
nant tone of praise and triumph in the Fourth 
and Fifth. This ancient division suggests what 
on other grounds seems a rational hypothesis, 
that the collection as we have it is one that was 
gradually made through a long course of time — 
each book marking a new accretion to the 
original stock. For this reason it is not sur- 
prising to find the composition of some lyrics 
separated by a considerable interval from that 
of others. The oldest is the one (xc.) ascribed 
to Moses — an ascription which, although often 
and severely attacked, can yet be successfully 
vindicated. Others are by common consent 
attributed to the period of the Exile or the 
Restoration. Some writers have assigned cer- 
tain Psalms to the Maccabees — a view in which 
Calvin so far shared as to consider that Pss. xliv., 
lx., lxxiv., and lxxix. were composed during the 
persecuting reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. But 
it is not necessary to defend at length the 
traditional view on this point, since even so 



INTRODUCTORY. 



15 



independent a thinker as Ewald, whose scholar- 
ship and insight no one disputes, scouts the 
Maccabean authorship as destitute of any ra- 
tional grounds. Taking, then, the age of Mal- 
achi as the time when the collection was com- 
pleted, we have a body of literature whose 
beginning is separated from its end by a thou- 
sand years — a space more than half as long 
again as that between Homer and Anacreon, 
or between Chaucer and Tennyson. 

But great as is the diversity of authorship 
and date, equally great is that of tone and spirit. 
All are by no means pitched in the same key. 
Avoiding minute details, I may specify three 
general divisions as indicating the variety of 
feeling and utterance. One is the Pathetic, or 
Mournful. A tradition as old as Origen gives 
to seven (vi., xxxii., xxxvi., li., cii., cxxx., cxliii.) 
the title of Penitential Psalms, but these are far 
from exhausting the list of such as may fairly 
be thus described. Indeed it is remarkable 
how amply the literature of sorrow is repre- 
sented in this book. No sufferer of any period, 
whether from age or infirmity,*or bereavement, 
or desertion, or treachery, or persecution, or 
exile, or any form of spiritual perplexity or 
darkness, fails to find an appropriate expres- 



j6 the psalter, 

sion of his feelings. So vivid are these utter- 
ances of the soul that no one can mistake them 
for flights of fancy. They are, they must be, 
the records of a real experience. In strong 
contrast with the " hearse-like airs," as Bacon 
calls them, are the Songs of Praise and Joy. 
The themes here are very various ; a recent 
deliverance from danger, a victory over national 
foes, the downfall of a persecuting tyrant, the 
glory of God expressed in His works, the same 
glory shining out in providential interpositions, 
the perfections of the Most High, and especially 
the displays of His loving-kindness. Here, 
again, is a fitting vehicle for the expression 
of similar feelings in all ages and countries. 
Thanksgiving and praise on whatever ground 
have a pattern in these old Hebrew lyrics, 
which leaves nothing to be desired. But what 
is truly remarkable, a feature which occurs no- 
where else that I know, sometimes both styles 
are united in the same composition. The writer 
begins in the deepest distress, a wail de profun- 
dis, but gradually, sometimes suddenly, passes 
into a strain exactly opposite ; and the groans 
and complaints of the first part are drowned in 
the triumphant hallelujahs of the second (vi., 
xiii., xxxi., etc.) But besides these impassioned 



INTRODUCTORY. 1 7 

utterances, there is a class of didactic or even 
gnomic compositions which are scarcely less in- 
teresting or useful. These for the most part 
set forth the character of the good man and the 
bad, and the consequent happiness or misery 
of their respective conditions, or the varied ex- 
cellencies of the divine law, or the vanity of 
human pursuits, or the duties of particular 
classes of men. Modern precision has objected 
to some of these as unsuited for lyrical pur- 
poses, but they were certainly sung or cantil- 
lated in the ancient Church, and the majority of 
the Christian Church in all ages, has found its 
account in cherishing didactic compositions as 
an integral part of the service of song in the 
house of the Lord. 

But while the Psalms have the differences 
which have been mentioned, and bear such 
strong marks of individuality, there are several 
features which belong to them in common, and 
give to them a unity of character, which quite 
forbids the thought that they are scattered and 
random utterances accidentally or capriciously 
gathered into a book. 

First, they are poetical, all of them. Of 
course not in the sense in which we apply that 



1 8 THE PSALTER, 

term to the verse of the ancient classics, or to 
that of any modern literature. The Hebrews 
knew nothing of rhythm or rhyme. A fearful 
amount of ingenuity and research has been 
wasted in vain endeavors to find some regular 
measures corresponding to the metres of the 
western nations. Nor does there seem any 
reason to suppose that the result would be dif- 
ferent, did we know (as confessedly we do 
not) the exact method of the ancient pronunci- 
ation of the language. Metres have not been 
discovered because they did not exist. Did they 
exist, we may be sure that the penetration 
which has unlocked the secrets of Hieroglyph- 
ic, Cypriote, and Cuneiform inscriptions would 
long since have shown the fact to the satisfac- 
tion of all. As the case stands, there is no 
more measured verse in the Hebrew Psalter 
than there is in the authorized version of the 
same. And we may well rejoice that it is so. 
Were it otherwise, how greatly would the diffi- 
culties of translation into other tongues be mul- 
tiplied ! It is hard enough to convey the sense 
of one language justly and gracefully into an- 
other, but the task is far sorer when form as 
well as substance has to be reproduced. Any 
good Greek scholar can give the full and exact 



INTRODUCTORY. 



19 



meaning of a ringing chorus of ^Eschylus or 
Sophocles, but not all combined can reproduce 
in English the music of the harmonious num- 
bers employed by the original poet. Our lit- 
erature abounds in imitations, but they are im- 
itations, and as much like the original as a wax 
flower is to what it represents — as much, but no 
more. There may be the perfection of mechan- 
ism, but there is no life. On the contrary, the 
poetical form of the Psalms can be perfect- 
ly well represented in almost anj^ language. 
There is a versified structure, but the versifica- 
tion does not depend upon sounds or words or 
accents, but upon things. Instead of being ver- 
bal, it is real. The relation between the success- 
ive lines of a Hebrew poem does not lie in the 
harmony of the words, but in the harmony of 
the ideas. Every poetical utterance of every 
kind, long or short, literal or figurative, ani- 
mated or calm, is made up of a series of bal- 
anced sentences or propositions, each of which 
corresponds in some way to the rest. This 
feature, called Parallelism by Lowth, who, 
though he by no means was its discoverer, yet 
was its most skilful and successful expounder, 
is the key to the entire structure. One clause 
leads us always to expect another, which shall 



20 THE PSALTER. 

either repeat the sentiment of the first, or set 
forth its opposite, or give a variation of the 
theme. The Parallelisms have been classified 
and named by various writers, but minutiae on 
this point are of no value. The one essential 
thing is that the poetical form lies in the rela- 
tion of the clauses or sentences, and necessarily 
carries with it the thought. Hence the truth of 
the remark so often made as to its unchange- 
able character in all versions, however rudely 
made. As Bishop Jebb says, " Hebrew poetry 
is universal poetry, the poetry of all languages 
and of all peoples ; the collocation of words is 
primarily directed so as to secure the best pos- 
sible announcement and discrimination of the 
sense. Let, then, only a translator be literal, and 
so far as the genius of the language will permit, 
let him observe the original order of the words, 
and he will infallibly put the reader in possession 
of all, or nearly all, that the Hebrew text can 
give to the best Hebrew scholar of the present 
day." Of course there are linguistic peculiarities 
which can not be reproduced in a modern tongue 
— such as the use of archaic terms, the introduc- 
tion of peculiar grammatical forms and termina- 
tions, and, at times, the employment of words, 
which suggest at once to a vernacular reader 



IN TROD UC TOR Y. 2 1 

what could not be conveyed to another except 
by a tedious periphrasis — as, for example, in 
Isaiah Ix. i, we read, " The glory of the Lord 
is risen upon thee. ,, The version is faithful, 
yet it does not convey to the English reader 
what the original does to the Hebrew, viz., 
that this glory would rise upon Zion with the 
same majesty and beauty with which the sun 
rises over the earth. But apart from these ex- 
ceptions, every literal version of Hebrew poetry 
in any tongue, gives to the reader a full and 
faithful impression of its beauty, sublimity, and 
force, whereas a bald prosaic rendering of the 
Iliad or of the Divina Commedia, would make 
one wonder where the far-famed glory of the 
original had gone. 

(2). But the Psalms are not only Poetical, 
but also, as has been said, belong to that species 
of poetry which is called Lyrical. The Hebrews 
had no epic and no drama. The argument of 
Ewald {Die Dichter des A. B. y I. 69, seq.) to 
show the existence of a theatre in the days of 
David and Solomon, is a conspicuous failure, 
which not even his profound insight and vast 
learning could avoid. To call Job a tragedy and 
Canticles a comedy, simply shocks common 
sense. But the dramatic element, so far as con- 



22 THE PSALTER. 

cerns representation of character, and dialogue, 
and refrain, and chorus, is not wanting even in the 
shorter utterances of the Hebrew muse, because 
they are for the most part pure lyrics, unques- 
tionably the oldest form of poetry and the fruit- 
ful germ of all others. It is as Ewald says, 
" The daughter of the moment, of swiftly rising, 
powerful feelings, of deep, stirring, and fiery 
emotions of the soul by which the poet is alto- 
gether carried away." It is a direct outpouring 
of the heart, the result of an impulse springing 
from the very foundations of our nature, *to 
express in w r ords what powerfully stirs within. 
But these words must in form correspond with 
that which they express, and hence they take 
the peculiar shape which we call poetic. The 
singer sings, in the first instance at least, to 
satisfy this inward pressure, and has no thought 
or aim beyond his immediate subject. Hence 
while his words take form, it is always form of 
the simplest kind, parallel utterances, strophes, 
refrains, occasional assonances, and the like, 
never rhymes or measured syllables. The de- 
velopment of the thought is varied by striking 
images of all kinds, by numerous personifica- 
tions of inanimate nature, by the introduction 
of changing scenes and persons, unexpected 



INTRODUCTORY. 



23 



applications, sharp transitions, and the boldest 
anthropomorphic representations of God and 
divine things. Yet all bears the unmistakable 
stamp of freshness and originality. Song never 
deals with the abstract, but with the concrete. 
It is personal and emotional. It starts from the 
feelings, and it speaks to the feelings. It is 
therefore intensely human. That element not 
only lies upon the surface, but pervades warp 
and woof of the whole. Hence always the 
lyrics of a people or a period are the truest 
expression of its character. When Lord Ma- 
caulay w^as seeking the materials for his incom- 
parable history, he made diligent search for 
every popular ballad, for every dingy half-sheet, 
as that which gave the very form and spirit of 
the time. And he was right. Other forms of 
utterance may be borrowed or imitated, but 
song wells up from the heart, and indicates 
unerringly what it is that stirs the interior 
recesses of the soul. A genuine singer sings 
not because he wants to sing, but because he 
must. The passion swelling within demands 
expression and will not be denied. 

(3). Accordingly the Psalter is eminently 
Hebraistic, or rather Palestinian, bearing in all 
its parts the evidence of its origin. None of its 



.24 THE PSALTER, 

characteristic features came from without. Even 
cultivated Egypt, where the seed of Abraham 
accomplished the slow transition from a family 
to a nation, exerted no influence here. Learned 
men have often tried to deduce the Mosaic 
ritual and cultus from Egyptian memories and 
traditions, but so far as I know, only one (De 
Ronge, Revue Contemporaine, 1856,) has ever 
dreamed of tracing Hebrew poetry to the land 
of the Pharaohs. The very thought is absurd. 
How could that rainless region with its one 
river and its one monotonous plain from the 
cataracts to the sea, suggest the boundless and 
varied stock of images and expressions which 
are found in the Psalms ? These in their com- 
bination could come alone from such a land as 
Palestine, with its hills and dales ; its fountains, 
wells, and brooks ; its lakes and seas ; its deep 
gorges ; its lofty precipices ; its snows and hail, 
and ice, and storm, and whirlwind ; its orchards 
and vines, and pastures, and grain fields, and 
gardens ; its fragrant and gorgeous wild flowers ; 
its dense forests, where birds sing among the 
branches, and wild beasts crouch in their dens ; 
its continual outlook upon the great sea on one 
hand, and the great desert on the other. The 
Holy Land is as distinctly marked by its natural 



INTRODUCTORY. 



25 



peculiarities as it is by its history and traditions. 
Its physical geography is unlike that of any 
other country on the face of the globe. No 
where is there such a furrow on the earth's 
surface as that made by the Jordan in its rapid 
and tortuous course from the roots of Hermon 
to the beautiful, yet awful gulf of Siddin. The 
summit of Lebanon is a little short of the limit 
of perpetual snow, while the Dead Sea is 1,300 
feet below the ocean level ; and therefore be- 
tween these limits are found the temperatures 
of all zones and their productions ; the palm and 
the sugar cane, and the cotton, and the fig, along 
with the apple, the wheat, the barley, and the 
grape. As Isaac Taylor says in a remarkable 
chapter of his Spirit of the Hebrew Poetry 
(London Ed., p. 72), " Palestine in the age of its 
wealth was a samplar of the world ; it was a 
museum country — many lands in one ; the tread 
of the camel in two or three hours, may now 
give the traveller a recollection of his own — 
come whence he may, from any country between 

the torrid zone and our northern latitudes 

Thus it was that the Hebrew poet found always 
near at hand those materials of his art which 
the poets of other lands had to seek for in dis- 
tant travel. Imagery, gay or grave, was around 



2 6 THE PSALTER. 

him everywhere, and these materials included 
contrasts the most extreme/' 

Yet while the tone and coloring are thus lo- 
cal, while the range of allusion and the wide 
diversity of natural symbols point unerringly to 
a Palestinian origin, the moulding and charac- 
teristic features come from the poet himself. 
His imagery bears the color and flavor of the 
soil, but he handles it for his own purposes. 
He possesses and is not possessed by his mate- 
rials. Matter is constantly subordinated to 
spirit, and nature to God. 

(4). Once more, the Psalter is absolutely true. 
This needs to be emphasized, because there are 
those who think that its poetical character is 
inconsistent with trustworthiness. A maxim in 
universal use treats truth and poetry as if they 
were irreconcilable opposites. And Goethe 
wrote an autobiography which he entitled " Po- 
etry and Truth : from my own Life," in which 
the contrast is very evident. The proportions 
of reality and romance are like those of " the 
half pennyworth of bread and x the intolerable 
deal of sack," in FalstafTs bills. Real incidents 
are poetically treated, i. e., in such a way as to 
give a very different impression from that which 
an actual spectator of them would receive. It 






IN TROD UCTOR Y. 



27 



is quite otherwise with the Psalms. In them 
we have an exemplification of the statement 
that poetry is essential truth allied with feeling, 
with imagination, with appropriate and vigorous 
expression. It is truth not argued, inferred, or 
proved, but truth seen and felt — truth filling the 
soul and then pouring itself forth as a fountain 
bursts out of the earth. It is concerned, not 
with the accidental and teriiporary, but with the 
necessary and eternal, with the essence of things 
rather than details. Hence the profound Aris- 
totle, himself anything but a poet, affirmed 
(De Poet, ix.) " that poetry is a more philosoph- 
ical and a more serious thing than history 
itself." For history treats of ra fcad'efcaorov, what 
is individual, and may or may not be repeated, 
but poetry of ra uad'oXov, what is universal, true 
in all places and for all time. Hence the poet, 
according to his name, is the maker. He does 
not copy, but creates. His work is the ideal em- 
bodied in and shining through the real. It 
gains at first hand, and as if by inspiration, what 
other writers and speakers reach' by slow and 
tentative processes. 

In consequence of the subjective nature of 
lyric poetry, and the intense mental action it im- 
plies, there is, one can not deny, a tendency to 



28 THE PSALTER. 

excess, to extravagance in thought and utterance. 
Yet those who are confessedly the greatest of 
epic poets — Homer, Dante, Milton — are marked 
by their truth and simplicity, by a calm repose, 
a sustained grandeur, resulting from conscious 
power. The same result is reached in the 
Psalter, but in another way. The flame of 
emotion glows through and through its utter- 
ances, transfiguring and ennobling everything, 
but it is always true to nature when nature is 
truest to virtue and to wisdom. The singer's ob- 
ject is not to win admiration by the splendor of 
genius, not to charm a listening multitude by 
tricks of invention or graces of song, but to 
please and honor the God of truth by articulat- 
ing what He himself inspired, or by giving 
form and shape to the most real and living ex- 
periences of the human soul. Hence the ab- 
sence of all that is unsuitable in theme or treat- 
ment. No erotic songs, no paeans to a national 
hero, no brilliant ideals of humanity, no meretri- 
cious ornament, nothing to dazzle, bewilder, or 
delude, nothing unreal or sophisticated, but 
everything stamped all the way through with 
the tokens of absolute truth. Take, for exam- 
ple, the One Hundred and Fourth Psalm, a divine 
ode of creation, a lyrical poem in which, as 



IN TROD UCTOR Y. 



2 9 



Humboldt says, "we are astonished to find in 
such limited compass, the whole universe — the 
heavens and the earth sketched with a few bold 
touches. The contrast of the labor of man 
with the animal life of nature, and the image of 
omnipresent, invisible Power renewing- the earth 
at will or sweeping it of its inhabitants, is a 
grand and solemn poetical creation. " The sa- 
cred songster follows the first chapter of Gene- 
sis. What Moses represents in narrative prose, 
the psalmist sets forth in a series of living pic- 
tures, which, for depth of color, brightness, 
tenderness, beauty, and grace, have never been 
surpassed. It is a continuous series of vivid 
images — Jehovah clothed with light as a gar- 
ment, making the clouds His chariot, and moving 
upon the wings of the wind ; the wild ass 
quenching his thirst at streams which God pro- 
vides ; the birds singing among the branches ; 
the wild goats finding a home in inaccessible 
crags ; the young lions seeking from God their 
prey ; the sea with the same fulness of life — 
its depths peopled with monsters, and its sur- 
face studded with sails ; and then, in. fine con- 
trast with this animal activity of lower creatures, 
the even tenor and calm dignity of man's daily 
life of labor. Yet with all this exuberant energy 



30 



THE PSALTER. 



and fertile play of the imagination, there is not 
a single false note, not a solitary departure from 
the purest and highest truth. On the contrary, 
even the early record in Genesis, so remarkable 
as to have attracted the praise of the heathen 
Longinus, does not set forth so strikingly the 
infinite greatness, the order, the life of the uni- 
verse, and its absolute dependence upon God. 
The same thing is vividly illustrated in an- 
other and very different psalm, the Eighteenth. 
This is a grateful retrospect by David of his 
peculiar career down to the time when he sat 
upon the throne of all Israel, and saw his ene- 
mies on all sides subdued. He begins with a 
series of lively figures denoting what God had 
been to him during his pilgrimage — his rock (of 
strength), his fortress, his deliverer, his rock 
(of refuge), his shield, his horn of salvation, his 
high tower. Then after setting forth the des- 
perate extremities in which he had fallen, he 
describes his deliverance. But how ? Not by 
a minute recital of his conflict with the lion and 
the bear, or with Goliath, his escape from the 
spear of Saul or the bows of the Philistines, his 
refuge at Adullam or Engedi, the defeat of the 
men of Keilah, or the means by which the hot 
pursuit of the fugitive was again and again 



INTRODUCTORY. 



31 



checked just at the point of success. No ; he 
masses all together, as if performed at one time 
and by one act, and pictures the whole as a 
magnificent Theophany. God comes to the 
rescue as He came of old to Sinai, and all nature 
is moved at His coming. The earth quakes and 
even mountains reel. Amid vaporous clouds 
the blaze of lightning is seen. Then the 
heavens seem to sink toward the earth, and 
amid the increasing gloom, behold, Jehovah 
riding upon the Cherubim, flying upon the 
wings of the wind. Darkness is His pavilion 
round about Him, but the brightness of His pres- 
ence dissipates the gathering clouds and the 
full fury of the storm bursts forth. Thunder 
and lightning, hailstones and coals of fire, 
scatter all foes, and lay bare the depths of the 
sea and the very foundations of the world. The 
consequence is the swift and certain deliverance 
of David. Now not a word of this is to be 
taken literally. The whole is a grand poetic 
picture, transferring to an individual experience 
the memorable display at the giving of the law. 
At no time did David see, except in imagination, 
the burning coals, the flying Cherub, the bared 
sea-bottom. Yet he has truly expressed the 
fact in relation to the marvellous Providence 



32 



THE PSALTER. 



which watched over his course from the sheep- 
fold to the throne. The actual care of God for 
His servant was as real and great, and effective 
as it could have been, had He came down in 
person to manifest it. The lofty lyric is there- 
fore true. It is not mere poetic license or 
fancy's exaggeration, but the vivid lyric expres- 
sion of what occurred, not once only, nor twice, 
but over and over during a lifetime. 

Now it is just this truth of the Psalter which 
is the foundation of the argument I have under- 
taken to present. That argument is strictly a 
fortiori. Leaving out of view the prose of 
Scripture, its history, its dogma, its ethics, its 
prophecy, whatever belongs to the discursive 
faculty, and treating only of one of those por- 
tions in which imagination and feeling predom- 
inate, the aim is to show that here where 
exaggeration and error might most of all be 
looked for, where tongue and pen run riot, 
where it is common to excuse aberrations from 
propriety on the ground that the poet must 
needs have license, just here there is no need 
for any abatement or qualification whatever. 
Wide as is the range of the Hebrew harp, 
varied as are its tones, intense as is its action, and 
spontaneous as is its movement, yet throughout 



INTRODUCTORY. 



33 



it never teaches, nor suggests, nor implies what 
is wrong in doctrine or in morals. In the live- 
liest play of the imagination, in the most soar- 
ing flight of dithyrambic fervor, there is a some- 
thing which keeps the singer from ever trans- 
gressing the bounds of reason and truth. Not 
that the Hebrew poets move in fetters or reel 
off their strains from a machine. They are the 
freest of all writers. The whole form and 
color of their utterances proceed from their 
personal character and circumstances, and ex- 
press the direct action of a human soul moved 
from within and not from without. Yet when 
subjected to a rigid scrutiny, these lyric out- 
bursts are found to have a correctness and a 
purity, the like of which has never been seen 
anywhere else since the world began. The 
argument is that if this be the fact, then only a 
supernatural, a divine influence can account for 
it. And if the songs of sacred Scripture be 
doctrinally and morally correct, much more 

must be its prosaic utterances. 
2* 



LECTURE II. 

THE DOCTRINE OF GOD IN THE PSALTER. 



LECTURE II. 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 

IMPORTANCE OF THIS POINT — THE PSALTER TEACHES THAT 
GOD IS ONE— DISTINCT FROM THE WORLD — OF INFINITE 
PERFECTION — HOLY — CONTRAST OF THE GRECIAN HYMNS 
— OF THE VEDAS — OF THE AVESTAN — NOT A QUESTION OF 
RACE — CONCLUSION. 

THE history of the Christian Church is a his- 
tory of the development of Christian doc- 
trine. Of development in the natural sense, and 
not in the non-natural sense in which the word 
was employed by Dr. Newman in his attempt to 
justify on this ground all the novelties of modern 
and mediaeval Popery. The whole mind and 
will of God for human salvation was, as we be- 
lieve and are sure, recorded in the Scripture, 
and as such admits of neither diminution nor 
increase. But the full meaning and explication 
of particular doctrines was not understood and 
formulated until, in course of time, reflection, ex- 
perience, and especially the sharp attacks of er- 
rorists, enabled the Church to draw the line ac- 
curately between the truth and that which falsely 

(37) 



38 



THE PSALTER. 



assumed to take its place. Thus was formed 
what is justly called the historical faith of the 
Church. Now it is notable that the first article 
of the common faith which was thus put under 
fire, and subjected to keen and unsparing criti- 
cism, was the doctrine of God. The Ebionite, 
Gnostic, Manichsean, Arian, Apollinarian, Sabel- 
lian, and Tritheistic heresies, all bear witness to 
the severity of the conflict. Nor is it at all won- 
derful that strife should begin just here. The 
object of worship is the first point in all re- 
ligion. This decides everything else, in the 
sense that if a man be wrong here, he will be 
so throughout. If he believe the Deity to 
be impersonal, or identified with the world, or 
more than one, or without providence, or lim- 
ited, or partial, or immoral, all his other beliefs 
will be modified accordingly. The stream can 
not rise higher than its fountain, nor can the 
worshipper be better than the Being whom he 
worships. 

I propose in this lecture to consider what is 
plainly taught or necessarily implied in the 
Psalms respecting the being, character, and per- 
fections of God, and then to compare it with the 
views given in other sacred anthologies, and 
from the comparison draw such inferences as 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 



39 



are fairly deducible. This course is the more 
interesting and suggestive, because it does not 
compare creed with creed, or law with law ; 
does not take up abstract formularies, carefully 
prepared and guarded, but deals with the actual 
workings of the religious principle, and shows 
how men, under the deepest excitements of 
feeling, conceived and represented Him whom 
they call God ; so that we learn not only what 
they professed, but what they actually believed, 
what really entered into and moulded life and 
character. 

(i). The Psalter knows of only one God. A 
great variety of names is applied to Him, but it 
is always one and the same Being that is meant. 
Some of these names are plural in form, and 
seem to suggest a plurality of persons in one 
substance — a suggestion which is further con- 
firmed by the language of the Second Psalm 
and the One Hundred and Tenth ; but however 
that may be, or whatever explanation of these 
peculiarities may be adopted, none can ques- 
tion that the unity of the Divine Essence is 
maintained throughout the entire book. Men- 
tion is indeed made of other gods, but never in 
the way of recognizing them as having a real 
existence, but as subsisting only in the vain 



40 



THE PSALTER. 



imaginations of their worshippers. Instead of 
being considered as actual rivals, they are call- 
ed false gods, idol gods, no gods. It is true 
we find no such formal and stately assertions of 
the divine unity as are given by Moses : " The 
Lord our God is one Lord " (Deuteronomy vi. 
4) ; or Hezekiah, " Thou art the God, even thou 
alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth" (2 
Kings xix. 15) ; or Isaiah, " I am the Lord, and 
there is no God besides me" (xlv. 6) ; but it is a 
stronger testimony when we find all the utter- 
ances of deep emotion, whether glad or sor- 
rowful, implying, as if unconsciously, or as if it 
were a matter about which no dispute could 
exist, that the object of worship is One. No 
hint is .given either of Dualism or Polytheism, 
although the writers were just as much tempted 
as any of their neighbors on the East or the 
West to fall back on these plausible, but super- 
ficial, methods of escaping from the difficulties 
met in understanding the moral government of 
the world. But while the Hebrew Lyrics main- 
tain thus clearly One God, they also represent 
Him throughout as — 

(2). Distinct from the world. Pantheism is 
the oldest and at the same time the youngest 
of religious errors. Its origin is sought among 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 41 

the most ancient traditions of the race, and yet 
to-day it is professed by not a few, even 
under the broad blaze of the Christian Revela- 
tion. There appears to be something strangely 
attractive in the conception of one eternal sub- 
stance of which all that appears from age to 
age is only a temporary modification. Men do 
not like either the name or the fact of being 
atheists, and they take refuge from the disa- 
greeable necessity in a scheme of thought which 
identifies God and the universe ; and yet there 
is no one but knows that to make everything 
God, and to say that there is no God, practically 
amounts to the same thing. All that is useful 
in Theism is equally done away in both cases. 
Yet ancient and widespread and enticing as 
this error is, there is not the least trace of it in 
the Psalms. They have much to say of God 
and much to say of His works, but the two are 
never represented as necessary and constituent 
parts of one whole. On the contrary, they are 
sharply distinguished. God, the personal God, 
is Maker and Ruler, while men and things are 
the product of His creative hand. " He spake, 
and it was done ; He commanded, and it stood 
fast" (xxxiii. 9). There are several of what 
might be called Psalms of Nature, in which there 



42 THE PSALTER. 

is a detailed description of natural objects ; but 
never is there even a trace of pantheistic thought 
or expression. Sun and moon, and the stars of 
light, dragons and all deeps, mountains and all 
hills, fruitful trees and all cedars, beasts and all 
cattle, creeping things and flying fowl — in short, 
the heavens and the earth, and whatever they 
contain, all, all are creatures of the divine power. 
"Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did He in 
heaven, and in earth, in the seas, and all depths " 
(cxxxv. 6). The sacred writers are familiar 
with all the grand or beautiful aspects of the 
external world which in every age have been 
the poet's storehouse of images and of senti- 
ment ; but we never find anything like the quasi- 
independence of nature which is disagreeably 
prominent in modern poets, such as Words- 
worth and Bryant. One of the most admired 
productions of the former is the well-known 
Tintern Abbey. Who does not remember the 
fine passage beginning, — 

For I have learned 
To look on nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
The still sad music of humanity, 
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue. 



THE DOCTRINE OE GOD. 



43 



The poet describes with wonderful strength 
and beauty the influence of external nature upon 
the human heart, showing, as does the whole 
piece, his imaginative force, his spiritual insight, 
and his power of vivid characterization. " His 
thoughts are fresh and have the dew on them. ,, 
Yet at the close he outrages all propriety in 
saying that he is 

Well pleased to recognize 
In nature, and the language of the sense, 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being. 

For this is simply to make nature take the 
place of God to the soul. The poet confounds 
the soft sensations produced by the beauties of 
the world of sense, with the moral emotions 
which the thought of the good God working in 
them produces. It is every way desirable to 
" see into the life of things," and to be able to 
obtain even from the meanest flower that blows 
"thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," 
but it is not at all necessary to call or consider 
all the emotions awakened by nature, piety. 
This is a perilous confusion of things that differ. 
Robertson of Brighton vindicates this passage 



44 THE PSALTER. 

from the charge of Pantheism by referring- to 
other poems of the author tending in a directly 
opposite direction, which, of course, are to be 
taken into account in estimating his position. 
But in the Psalter there is no need of balancing 
one portion against another. The Hebrew 
singers looked upon the earth's fair variety of 
things with as much kindling imagination and 
reflective insight as any poet of ancient India or 
modern England ; but never for an instant, or 
under any circumstances, did they use language 
which could suggest that they identified the 
world and its Maker, but just the contrary. For 
example, in the magnificent storm described in 
Ps. xxix, which, as Delitzsch says, begins with 
a gloria in excelsis, and ends in a pax in terris ; 
every feature — the gathering fury of the ele- 
ments, the peal of thunder, the flash of the 
lightning, the crashing cedars, and the quaking 
mountains — is ascribed directly to the Lord who 
sits as King forever, and who, controlling the 
wildest uproar of earth, gives to His people both 
strength and peace. 

The works of the American writer referred 
to contain an exquisite poem, entitled Thana- 
topsis, written at the age of eighteen, and per- 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 



45 



haps unsurpassed by anything produced in the 
long course of the author's after years. It be- 
gins— 

To Kim who in the love of nature holds 
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks 
A various language ; 

and it proceeds to interpret that language under 
varying circumstances, especially in reference to 
the end of life. Yet even the name of God 
does not once occur. The author was, we 
know, as he still is, a Christian, yet his verse 
might have been written by a firm believer in 
Spinoza or Hegel. I am not finding fault with 
the poem. Its perfect rhythm, its unity, its sus- 
tained thought, its felicities of allusion and ex- 
pression disarm criticism. And it must be ad- 
mitted that in other efforts of Mr. Bryant's 
muse, such as the noble Forest Hymn, the the- 
istic recognition is as distinct as any one could 
desire. But the characteristic of the Psalter is 
that there are no exceptions to its tone. It 
holds firmly to the everlasting distinction be- 
tween the universe and its Creator. All nature 
is but the expression of God's glory, and it al- 
ways points to something above and beyond 
itself. Nor is there a line inconsistent with the 
lofty utterance at the close of Psalm cii., — 



46 ' THE PSALTER. 

Of old hast Thou laid the foundation of the earth, 

And the heavens are the work of Thy hands ; 

They shall perish, but Thou remainest, 

Yea, all of them shall wax old as a garment, 

As a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall 

be changed ; 
But Thou art the same, 
And Thy years shall have no end. 

(3). The God of the Psalter is not only God 
alone, and distinct from the world, but possess- 
ed of infinite attributes. These are sometimes 
formally stated, at others quietly assumed as 
the basis of prayer, praise, or devout medita- 
tion. We, of course, are familiar with the con- 
ception of God as the infinite Spirit in whom all 
excellence inheres. But the glory of the Psalm- 
ists is that, writing when and where they did, 
they made no mistakes upon the subject. 
Neither tradition, nor philosophy, nor concep- 
tions borrowed from their neighbors, ever led 
them to any unworthy representations of the 
object of worship. Take, for example, the first 
attribute of Deity which suggests itself to man, 
that of Power. If God be distinct from the 
world, then either He made the world, or, what 
seems to be the natural outcome of the Devel- 
opment Theory when pushed to its legitimate 
results, the world made God. The Psalmists 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 



47 



have no hesitation here. To them God is 
V**by, the most High, and ^ttf, the Almighty. To 
Him none on earth, none in heaven are to be 
compared. Strong is His hand, high is His 
right hand. The heavens are His, the earth 
also is His ; as for the world and the fulness 
thereof, He has founded them (lxxxix.) He sits 
serene upon the flood, yea, He sits as King for- 
ever. The power of men, of all creatures, is 
necessarily limited. We must use means to ac- 
complish our ends, and patiently contrive expe- 
dients to make nature subservient to our pur- 
poses. But God wills, and it is done. He ac- 
complishes without effort whatever seems good 
to Him. As the Thirty-third Psalm says, 
" By the word of the Lord were the heavens 
made ; and all the host of them by the breath 
of His mouth." The idea of creation as wrought 
either by necessity or by law never seems to 
have occurred to the Hebrew singers. All 
that is seen is due to One Supreme Personal 
Will. " Our God is in the heavens ; He hath 
done whatsoever He pleased " (cxv. 3). 

So also of God's Eternity. There is no at- 
tempt at a philosophical explanation of timeless 
existence, but a simple distinct assertion that 
the Lord is exalted above all the limitations of 



48 THE PSALTER. 

time. This indeed is implied in the peculiar, 
revealed, covenant name, Jehovah — I am. 

The sublime thought of self-existence in- 
volves the similar thought of eternity. But the 
Psalter affirms the truth in direct words : 

Before the mountains were brought forth, 

Or ever Thou gavest birth to the earth and the world, 

Even from everlasting to everlasting Thou art God. 

A thousand years in Thy sight 

Are but as yesterday when it passeth, 

And as a watch in the night. — (xc). 

He, therefore, is without beginning of days 
or end of years. He is, He always has been, 
He always will be. With Him there is no dis- 
tinction between the past, the present, and the 
future. "A thousand years are in Thy sight 
as yesterday when it is passed." With Him 
duration is an eternal now. But this thought 
is uttered not as a mere sentiment, but in liv- 
ing contrast with man's brief, shifting, troubled 
years, and as an ever-enduring support un- 
der the consciousness of human sin and frailty. 
For which reason the lofty and plaintive Psalm 
I have quoted is read to-day at a Christian 
funeral with the same propriety and force as 
when three thousand years ago men first turned 
in their sorrow to the Eternal God as a Refuge. 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD, 



49 



In like manner are we taught respecting 
God's immensity. He is infinite in relation to 
space just as tie is in relation to time. He is 
equally present with all His creatures, at all 
times and in all places. No explanation of the 
truth is given or attempted, but the fact is set 
forth with wonderful power and beauty. 

Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit ? 

Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? 

If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there ; 

If I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; 

Even there shall Thy hand lead me, 

And Thy right hand shall hold me. — (cxxxix). 

It is true, Calvin says that this passage is 
wrongly applied to prove the infinite nature of 
God, for the writer is not concerned with meta- 
physical conceptions, but with the practical 
truth, that by no change of place or circum- 
stance can man escape from the eye of God. 
Undoubtedly the immediate aim is what the great 
Reformer states, but in reaching this the Psalm- 
ist does assert the divine omnipresence, not 
theoretically, but as an actual fact. And the 
way in which he does it shows only the more 
vividly that he does not hold it as a mere ab- 
3 



5o 



THE PSALTER. 



stract dogma, but as a vital truth, powerfully 
influencing one's heart and life. As God acts 
everywhere, so is He present everywhere. 
Spiritual, without form, and therefore invisible, 
He is present with every blade of grass, every 
fish of the sea or bird of the air, with every 
thought of man's heart, with every angel, fallen 
or elect, with every star in the firmament, with 
all the works of His hands throughout illimita- 
ble space. And as with His presence, so with 
His knowledge. It is without bounds. Here 
again we find none of the speculations with 
which theologians and scholars have wearied 
themselves in all ages, but simple unambiguous 
statements, which convey the truth distinctly to 
the mind of the most unlettered. Indeed, so 
far from attempting to explain the truth, the 
writers confess their inability to comprehend it. 
As we see in the opening of the fine Psalm 
already quoted. 

O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me. 

Thou knowest my downsitting- and mine uprising ; 

Thou understandest my thought afar off. 

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, 

And art acquainted with all my ways. 

For there is not a word in my tongue, 

But lo, O Lord, Thou knowest it altogether. 

Is it any wonder that after this statement of 




THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 5 1 

God's exhaustive knowledge, the Psalmist 
should add, "Such knowledge is too wonderful 
for me ; it is high, I cannot attain unto it." 
How can the finite overtake the infinite ? Still 
we can take in and feel the preciousness of the 
truth that our God is one whose knowledge ex- 
tends to all the past and all the future, and so 
can be neither increased nor diminished ; to 
whom the darkness and the light are alike ; who 
knows our thoughts even better than we do 
ourselves, and who is, therefore, absolutely per- 
fect. 

(4). But while the book is thus full and clear 
upon the natural attributes of the Most High, 
it is not less, but rather more, distinct and express 
upon His Moral Perfections. The sum of these 
is set forth in one word, the frequency and em- 
phasis of which in the Psalms separates them 
widely from any other so-called Sacred Anthol- 
ogy which the world contains. This is Holi- 
ness, which is set forth as the peculiar and dif- 
ferentiating characteristic of Jehovah. 

Thou art holy, 

O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel. — (xxii. 3). 

Unto Thee will I sing with the harp, 

O Thou Holy One of Israel !— (lxxi. 22). 

Exalt the Lord our God, 



52 THE PSALTER. 

And worship at His holy hill, 

For He is Holy. — (xcix. 9). 

Holy and reverend is His name. — (cxi. 9). 



This term denotes entire freedom from moral 
evil of any and every kind. It is not an excel- 
lence in any particular direction, but absolute 
completeness, and as such it is ascribed to God 
in the most exclusive terms. Evil can not dwell 
with Him, the foolish shall not stand in His 
sight. The utterance of Bildad (Job xxv. 5) on 
this subject is as true as it is poetical, " Behold 
even to the moon, and it shineth not ; yea, the 
stars are not pure in His sight." All creatures, 
even the best, the angels who stand nearest the 
throne, are mutable in their own nature and 
limited in their capacities. Holiness in them 
is but an accident or a quality, but in God it is 
the very substance of His nature. He is as 
necessarily holy as He is necessarily God. 

This is the fair implication from the language 
of the sacred poets. And when we look into 
the peculiar forms in which this essential glory 
of the divine nature is manifested, the same 
perfection is to be seen. The Psalmists do not 
ascribe to God infinite purity in gross, and then 
take it away in detail. Their teaching is one 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 



53 



and the same throughout. Take, e. g. $ the 
primary conception which we have of the Su- 
preme Ruler, viz., that He is just. The doc- 
trine is that in all His dealings with His rational 
creatures He is righteous. His laws are holy 
and just and good, and these laws are faithfully 
administered. There is no partiality nor fickle- 
ness. God renders to every man according to 
his works — never condemning the innocent, 
never clearing the guilty. Xow, while it is true 
that this view must be entertained by any ra- 
tional theist — for an unjust Supreme God is an 
unthinkable idea — yet as we all know by obser 
vation, if not by experience, there are many 
things in this world which seem to militate 
against the equity of the governor of the world. 
The prosperity of wicked men, and the afflic- 
tions of the righteous, apparently, at least, pre- 
sent a constant impeachment of the divine jus- 
tice. This mournful contrast has always existed 
as it does now ; and it was distinctly recognized 
by the Psalmists. Nay, they present it not un- 
frequently with the greatest vividness, and often 
in the way of earnest complaint. It is the bur- 
den of many a prayer, the source of many a 
painful perplexity. God's providence seems to 
run counter to His repeated promises, and the 



54 



THE PSALTER. 



pious sufferer is tempted to say, " Verily, in 
vain have I cleansed my heart, and washed my 
hands in innocency." But never for one mo- 
ment is the rectitude of Jehovah questioned. 
In the darkest hour, when flesh and heart fail, 
the soul still holds firmly that the Judge of all 
the earth must do right. Clouds and darkness 
may be around Him, but righteousness and judg- 
ment are the habitation of His throne (xcvii. 2). 
Nor is "the divine righteousness a mere name, 
but a reality. Jehovah is the God to whom 
vengeance belongeth. He is angry with the 
wicked every day. A fire goeth before Him 
and burneth up His enemies round about 
(xcvii.) He teareth in pieces, and there is none 
to deliver (1. 22). No combinations succeed 
against Him ; " He that sitteth in the heavens 
shall laugh/' Nor do any outward professions 
of rectitude avail ; " Unto the wicked He saith, 
What hast thou to do to declare my statutes, 
or that thou shouldst take my covenant in thy 
mouth ? " And yet side by side with these 
assertions of God's strict punitive righteous- 
ness are the most ample and express statements 
of His grace. 

How excellent is Thy loving-kindness, O Lord ! — (xxxvi. 7). 
The Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting — (c. 3). 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 



55 



The Lord is merciful and gracious, 

Slow to anger and plenteous in kindness. 

He will not always chide, 

Neither keep His anger forever. 

For as the heaven is high above the earth, 

So great is His mercy toward them that fear Him. 

— (ciii. 8, 9, n). 

Every reader is familiar with these amiable 
and winning representations of God. They 
run through and through the book. And they 
concur with the sterner utterances before cited 
to round out one absolutely complete concep- 
tion — a God, holy yet gracious, just yet merci- 
ful. Neither attribute is sacrificed to the other. 
No one-sidedness is to be seen. In the same 
collection we have a psalm like the Fiftieth, de- 
scribing in sublime strains Jehovah's universal 
judgment, and another, like the One Hundred 
and Thirty-sixth, where the refrain of every 
verse is, "His mercy endureth forever." The 
precise theoretical reconciliation of these per- 
fections could not, of course, be known to the 
ancient saints as it is to us who live since the 
Incarnation of the Son of God ; but the pecul- 
iarity of the case is that, without the flood of 
light shed by the Gospel, these sacred poets, 
writing at such different times and places, yet 
held the balance so even, and set forth an idea 



56 



THE P SALTER 



of God as men's ruler and judge so well-poised 
and adequate, that even the New Testament 
does not alter the lines. The best thoughts of 
the best Christians toward God are still fully 
and justly expressed in the words of the old 
Psalmists — and that not coldly nor dogmatically, 
but with the energy and fire with which the 
soul is stirred when it comes to a hand to hand 
grapple with the great problems of human life 
and human destiny. 

Such, then, is the theology of the Psalten 
No mysticism, no vagueness, no confusion, but 
the clear conception of one infinite and eternal 
Being ; a personal Spirit, who, instead of being 
of the world or identified with it, is its Maker 
and Ruler ; who has all conceivable perfections ; 
who does according to His own will, at all times 
and in all places ; but who although thus exalted 
makes Himself known to His creatures, directs 
their service, accepts their praises, hears their 
prayers, counts their tears, soothes their sor- 
rows, forgives their sins, quickens their souls, 
and is their refuge, counsellor, friend and father. 
And all this, not drawn into a creed, nor 
arranged in logical formulas, but wrought into 
the experience and expressed in the words of 
men under the deepest excitements of feeling. 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 



57 



How came they to give utterance to such a 
noble and consistent conception of God ? Their 
case stands alone in all the records of ancient 
times. Other races and nations indeed had 
their sacred poems, their hymns to the gods, 
their expression in lyrical form of religious and 
devotional feeling, but nothing comparable to the 
strains of David, or Heman, or Asaph. Take 
the ancient Greeks. We have a small collec- 
tion of Hymns to the Gods, popularly known as 
the Minor Homeric Poems, and once supposed 
to be the work of Homer, but now known to 
be of a different authorship. The first remark 
to be made of them is that they are polytheistic. 
All are addressed to different gods and god- 
desses, and although they are exquisite produc- 
tions of the muse, abounding in tenderness, or 
grace, or humor, and expressed with all the 
curious felicity of phrase natural to the best 
poets of Hellas, they have no claim whatever 
to consideration as utterances of serious devo- 
tion. Instead of offering devout worship to one 
supreme and infinitely exalted, yet gracious 
Being, they celebrate the power, the wisdom, 
the adventures, the amours, the pranks of 
Apollo, or Mercury, or Venus, or Ceres, or 
Mars, or Bacchus. The hymn to Aphrodite or 



58 THE PSALTER. 

Venus recounts at length her liaison with An- 
chises, and although an English editor speaks 
of its instinctive propriety of manner and words, 
yet I am quite sure it could not be read before 
any such audience as I now address, much less 
a promiscuous assembly. So the hymn to Mer- 
cury is simply a diverting recital of the exploits 
of this little born rogue among the dwellers of 
Olympus — how he stole the oxen of the sun, and 
what enormous lies he told to Apollo and to Ju- 
piter when charged with his offence. The 
nearest resemblance to it in modern literature, 
that I know of, is Moliere's Comedy, entitled 
Les Fourberies de Scapin. And although the 
hymns to the Delian and the Pythian Apollo 
do not shock morality so grossly, yet with all 
their poetic fire and beauty, they display a 
coarseness of thought and feeling, and an ex- 
ercise of low earth-born tempers in the immor- 
tals, wholly incompatible with the reverence 
which we instinctively feel to be due to any 
object of worship. Poetic inspiration is found 
abundantly in these Homeric hymns, but of any 
real divine theopneusty there is not a trace. 
The same thing is true of the Theogony of 
Hesiod, and the hymns of Callimachus. The 
whole atmosphere of these poems is as differ- 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 



59 



ent from that of the Psalter, as jest is from 
earnest. There is abundance of poetic feeling, 
of fine imagination, of delicate allusion, and be- 
witching description, but not a solitary ex- 
pression of humilicy, faith, or spiritual aspiration. 
All is of the earth, earthy. 

But let us try the comparison with the pro- 
ductions of the Hindu muse. Within the 
present century the treasures of the ancient 
Sanscrit literature have been exhumed from 
their long grave, and by translation and com- 
mentary been made known to English readers. 
It seems to be satisfactorily made out that a 
considerable portion of the Rig- Veda — very 
much the most important and valuable of all 
the Vedas — must date back to a period between 
one thousand and fifteen hundred years before 
Christ, and therefore expresses the earliest 
thought of the Aryan races upon religious 
topics. This Veda contains both poetry and 
prose. The former, the earlier portion, consists 
of ten books, in which there are more than a 
thousand separate hymns, all of which are claim- 
ed by the Brahmanic authorities to be the result 
of divine inspiration — the work of the Deity 
alone, down to the very last line. The whole 
of these poems has not yet been translated, and 



60 THE PSALTER. 

perhaps never will be ; and much of them, Max 
Miiller says, " Will and must remain to us a 
dead letter" {Chips from a German Workshop, 
L, 75), "owing to the difficulty of introducing 
ourselves into the circle of thought and feeling 
in which these writers so far back, and in such 
different circumstances habitually moved." Did 
it not occur to this scholar to ask why we do 
not have the same difficulty of entering into the 
Psalmist's circle of thought and feeling? Yet 
enough has been put into English to enable us 
justly to estimate the ethical or theological value 
of the whole. The same writer, a critic neither 
incompetent nor severe, says, " Large numbers 
of the Vedic hymns are childish in the extreme ; 
tedious, low, common-place. The gods are 
constantly invoked to protect their worshippers, 
to grant them food, large flocks, large families, 
and a long life ; for all which benefits they 
are to be rewarded by the praises and sacri- 
fices offered day after clay, or at certain sea- 
sons of the year. But hidden in this rubbish 
are precious stones," {Chips, I., 26). Now it 
is undeniable that Monotheism is not the 
doctrine of the Vedas. In numberless cases 
the hymns are addressed to individual deities, 
whose names suggest almost irresistibly their 



THE DOCTRINE OE GOD. 6 1 

origin from the objects or forces of nature — 
e. g., the sun, the earth, the dawn, the storms, 
the waters, the fire, etc. However beautiful, 
lofty, or impressive these addresses may at 
times be, however true it is that the poet, when 
writing, considered the god he addressed as 
supreme and absolute, losing all the others 
from sight ; yet the gathering of these different 
hymns into the same collection produced all the 
effects of the ordinary polytheism of other lands 
in degrading the idea of God, and paving the 
way for the monstrous excesses of idolatry. 
And if, on some occasions, the Hindu poets 
rose to the conception of a Supreme mind, 
transcending all other minds, it was yet identi- 
fied with nature ; so that the whole collection 
oscillates perpetually between Polytheism and 
Pantheism. It is true, that sometimes there 
are ascriptions of praise which remind one of 
Biblical utterances ; as when it is said of Va- 
runa, " Where two persons sit together, he is 
the third/' " The two seas (sky and ocean) 
are Varuna's loins ; he is also contained in this 
drop of water." " He counts the twinklings of 
the eyes of men." " As a player throws the 
dice, he settles all things." "May all thy fatal 
nooses catch the man who tells the lie, may 



62 THE PSALTER. 

they pass by him who tells the truth." {Chips > 
I., 41). There is, too, the recognition of the 
power and will of the gods to pardon sin : " Va- 
runa is merciful even to him who has commit- 
ted sin," (p. 40). But for the purpose of com- 
parison the Veda is to be estimated as a whole. 
To take selected passages, and from them to 
infer the character and bearing of the rest, is to 
fall into the same error as the late Mr. Deutch, 
who gathered out of the Talmud a number of its 
most striking things, and left the impression 
upon his readers, that these fairly represented 
the immense body of matter contained in a 
number of folio volumes — the most gigantic ac- 
cumulation of fable, filth, and trash the world 
has ever seen. 

The same remark is to be made concerning 
the hymns taken from the Zend-Avesta, the 
sacred book of a religion justly said to be, of all 
ethnic faiths, the most admirable for the depth 
of its philosophy, the spirituality of its views and 
doctrines, and the purity of its morality. The 
Zendic Canon is made up of several separate 
portions differing in age, origin, and character. 
Hymns of praise are contained in all these, but 
the most interesting portion is found in the so- 
called Gathas, five collections of religious lyrics, 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 63 

each collection written in a different metre. 
The doctrine they hold respecting God is un- 
doubtedly sublime and elevating. There is no 
worship of nature, no bowing to images, no 
identification of God with the world; but on the 
contrary, a distinct recognition of one self-exist- 
ent and eternal Being who is the Creator of all 
things. " I invoke/' says the Yacma, " Ahura 
Masda, brilliant, resplendent, greatest and best. 
All-perfect, all-powerful, all-pure, source of true 
knowledge, of real happiness ; Him who created 
us, Him who sustains us, wisest of all intelli- 
gences/' But while this lofty monotheism in 
form was maintained, while Ahura Masda was 
held to be the creator and ruler of the universe, 
and the author of all good ; yet, it was also 
held that there were other sorts of beings who 
formed a body of malevolent and harmful pow- 
ers, and from whom came all the wickedness, 
impurity, and unhappiness in the world. This 
was the beginning of what afterwards became a 
fully-developed Dualism, both philosophical and 
theological. And thus I account for a coldness 
and vagueness which marks the highest utter- 
ances of the Zoroastrian singers. We find bright 
thoughts, happy sayings, fine descriptions, but 
nothing like the affectionate, tender, loving con- 



64 THE PSALTER. 

fidence which breathes through the Hebrew 
lyrics. The assurance of the Psalmists that 
Jehovah was absolutely supreme over all worlds, 
and that He shared His dominion in no degree, 
and in no form, with any other beings, was so 
complete and thorough, that all their reverence 
and all their hope was toward Him. They, there- 
fore, adopt a tone which, even in the highest 
flights of imagination, or in the widest reach of 
poetic license, never loses its sense of complete 
and all-absorbing devotion to the Being of 
whom or to whom they sing. While they fear- 
ed Him as they feared no one else, they loved 
Him as they loved no one else. It is especially 
remarkable how they familiarized the thought 
of God without ever in the least degrading 
Him in their apprehensions. Some modern 
Christians, whose sincerity it would be a breach 
of charity to question, are in the habit of speak- 
ing of, and to, their Maker in a tone which is 
very offensive not merely to a cultivated taste, 
but to a truly devout soul. It lacks reverence, 
modesty, delicacy. It forgets the distance be- 
tween heaven and earth, and treats the Infinite 
One as if He were a product of clay like 
themselves. No approach to such an error is 
found in the Psalter. Its writers bring down 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 6$ 

the Deity quite within the sphere of human 
affections, but never impair His majesty. In 
their most exulting moments they are always 
reverent, and the object of their hope, and trust, 
and joy, however tenderly and affectionately 
addressed, is still to them God — the God whose 
greatness is unsearchable, and whose under- 
standing is infinite. 

The question, then, arises, How came these 
Hebrews to get and retain the conception of one 
supreme, personal God, infinitely great, yet in- 
finitely condescending ? The answer given by 
Mons. Renan, who, however we may repudiate 
his philosophy, is anything but contemptible as 
a scholar, is that the whole question is one of 
race. The Semitic family, he says, had the 
monotheistic instinct, and this accounts for their 
constant faith in one God alone. But such a 
theory is every way untenable. For, in the 
first place, as a matter of fact polytheism is 
found among the majority of the Semitic races, 
It prevailed in the Arabian tribes, in Philistia 
and Phoenicia, and in Syria and Mesopotamia, 
Among these, the sun, the moon, the planets, 
and all the host of heaven, as well as other 
forces of nature, were deified and worshipped. 
It is only in one branch of the race that we find 



66 THE PSALTER. 

Monotheism maintained. Besides, the answer 
itself needs explanation. The instinct of the 
irrational animals we understand as the working 
of the nature given to them, but how can men 
have an instinct unless implanted by their Crea- 
tor ? Moreover, an instinct is invariable. How 
came this instinct, if such it were, to be so often 
utterly denied and extirpated, and that, not for a 
short period, but for generations and ages ? 
But the whole theory is baseless. Its consider- 
ation only brings out" more broadly the point 
aimed at in this lecture. All over the ancient 
world was Polytheism or Dualism. The 
Aryan races and the Semitic races alike fell 
into the monstrous error. It pervades all their 
literature, whether in hieroglyph, or cuneiform, 
or ordinary script, and was set forth in pictures 
and images. But there is one exception, only 
one, i. e. y the Hebrews. And here it is found 
only in their literature. As for the people them- 
selves, they displayed a constant tendency to go 
after other gods — not for the most part exchang- 
ing Jehovah for a heathen deity, which they did 
only in the days of Ahab and Jezebel, but 
taking this deity into partnership with Jehovah. 
This disposition runs through all their history 
from the days of Jacob down to the Captivity in 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. fy 

Babylon. That history has justly been said " to 
be made up of an almost uninterrupted series of 
relapses into polytheism/' And yet this fact 
left no stamp upon their poetry. The sacred 
singers never for an instant give way to the 
error, or even assert the truth in a wavering or 
uncertain manner. In the height of joy, one 
God is praised ; in the depth of gloom, one God 
is supplicated. Other gods are mentioned only 
to be disparaged or denied. Nature is fre- 
quently and grandly described, but always as 
the creature of God. The events of the past 
are often recounted, but never as results of des- 
tiny or caprices of fortune, but as the manifested 
will of One whose throne is in the heavens, and 
whose kingdom ruleth over all. Whence came 
this remarkable peculiarity subsisting through a 
thousand years ? Surely not from the efforts of 
the Jews themselves, their grasp of intellect or 
stretch of speculation. Of all the ancient nations 
they were the least endowed with the philo- 
sophic spirit. Neither their language nor their 
character fitted them for the minute inquiries 
and subtle distinctions which abounded among 
the flower of the Aryan races. And yet they 
held fast with an unyielding grasp a truth which 
eluded the laborious culture of Athens and 



68 THE PSALTER. 

Alexandria. But in fact they never pretended 
that their idea of the one supreme God was a 
discovery of their own. " He made known 
His ways unto Moses, His acts unto the chil- 
dren of Israel." The historical Psalms go back 
to Abraham (cv. 6) as the head of the race, and 
refer all the distinctions of the people to the reve- 
lation made to him and^his successors. This, I 
say, is their account of the origin of their knowl- 
edge of God, and it is the only account which 
fully meets the requirements of the case. God 
Himself segregated this race from the children 
of men, and made them the depositories of His 
truth, confirming and upholding the original 
disclosure by continual subsequent communica- 
tions, from time to time, and thus guarding 
against the corruptions to which all human in- 
stitutions are liable. Only in this way can we 
explain the marvellous purity, and beauty, and 
consistency of the doctrine of God set forth in 
the old Hebrew Psalms. Beyond all question 
these Psalms are human, but equally beyond 
question are they Divine. The brightest gem 
in the whole range of addresses to the Gods, 
found in Greek literature, is the Hymn of the 
Stoic Cleanthes, addressed to Jupiter, which 
does really contain some fine thoughts and 



THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 69 

sounding phrases. But the entire hymn is a 
splendid illusion. " Stoic dogma empties Stoic 
hymnology of half its sublimity and more than 
half its devoutness." The Father in heaven 
whom Cleanthes praises, and to whom he prays, 
is not a personal Being, all-righteous and all- 
holy, whose loving care may be aptly symbolized 
by the tenderness of an earthly parent, but is 
only another name for nature, for necessity, for 
fate, for the universe. The stately words which 
the writer uses are employed only in a forced 
and unnatural sense. But the Psalmists always 
mean just what they say, or if there is any dif- 
ference, it is because words can not express the 
fulness and vigor of their thought. In no case 
do they use language transcending their own 
feelings and conceptions. And there are scores 
of these sacred songs as much superior to Cle- 
anthes' Hymn as this is to the Minor Homeric 
Poems. How is it that the singers of an obscure 
and despised nation, whom the classic races 
stigmatized as barbarous, and who, in the arts 
of life, in all the mental and social habits which 
lead to depth and breadth of thought, or to the 
sense and creation 01 beauty, were barbarous in 
the comparison, yet produced the only concep- 
tion of God which, by the general consent of 



7o 



THE PSALTER. 



the wise and good, is pronounced to be just, 
and true, and satisfying ? The people were mer- 
ciless and bloody ; they were constantly prone 
to the coarsest irreligion and profligacy, yet 
their sacred singers express thoughts about God 
which have been welcomed and adopted by the 
gentlest, the most refined, and the most saintly 
spirits whom the world has ever seen. How is 
this to be accounted for? No answer can be 
given which does not affirm a divine guidance 
which controlled thought, and tongue, and pen. 



LECTURE III. 

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN IN THE PSALTER. 



LECTURE III. 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 

MAN'S ORIGIN AND PLACE IN NATURE — EIGHTH PSALM — 
HIS MORAL CORRUPTION — THIS UNKNOWN TO OTHER 
SINGERS — THE REASON OF THE FACT — THE PSALTER 
PRAISES GOD AND NOT MAN — NO MYTHICAL IDEALS OF 
HUMANITY — NO PESSIMISM — LOFTY FAITH IN GOD AND 
ATTACHMENT TO HIM — NO CLANNISHNESS — HOPE FOR THE 
WORLD — THIS NOW A COMMON PLACE, NOT SO THEN — 
CONCLUSION. 

IN the last lecture the subject was the teach- 
ing of the Psalter respecting God, His nature 
and attributes, and His relations to men. This 
point naturally came first, because it is first — be- 
ing the pivot upon which all other truths turn. 
But next to the question of God, comes that of 
man. How is he regarded as to his position in 
the world — his origin, his character, his duty, and 
his destiny. This constitutes the other factor 
in any scheme of religious thought, and is 
worthy of the most attentive consideration. 
What, then, is the doctrine of the Psalms on 
this point? Is it like that of other religious 
systems ? Does it start on the same plane 

4 (73) 



74 



THE PSALTER. 



and arrive at the same end ? or does it differ 
widely, and if so, how shall we account for the 
difference ? 

The first inquiry respects man's origin and 
his place in creation. The general doctrine of 
antiquity on this subject was that man is a spon- 
taneous production of the earth, since almost 
all philosophers held that matter was eternal, 
on the ground ex nihilo nihil fit — the idea of 
creation seeming to them unphilosophical and 
incredible. The earth was assumed to be preg- 
nant with the germs of all living organisms, 
which were quickened into life under favorable 
circumstances. Hence the great boast of the 
Athenians was that they were not derived from 
any other existing race, but avrotcQoveg, sprung 
from the soil. It is true, we have what seems a 
contrary doctrine in the statement quoted by 
Paul in his address on Mars' Hill at Athens, 
Tov yap Kalyevog eofitv, whether we suppose this 
fine utterance taken from Aratus of Cilicia, 
(270 B.C.) or from the famous hymn of Clean- 
thes, the Stoic. But these were mere 
sporadic utterances, and besides were rather 
used to show that God was like to man than 
that man was like to God. The former view 
being the prolific parent of idolatry in its 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN, 



75 



grossest forms, while the latter, as handled by 
the great Apostle, furnishes the most emphatic 
protest against such a degrading habit. 

In the Psalms, on the contrary, the position 
long before taken in Genesis — that man was 
made, and that he was made in the image of 
God — is everywhere assumed, and sometimes 
explicitly formulated and poetically developed. 
As in the iooth Psalm, "Know ye that the 
Lord He is God : it is He that hath made us 
and not we ourselves : we are His people and 
the sheep of His pasture." Still more vividly 
is this set forth in the 8th Psalm, where David 
gives feeling expression to the insignificance of 
man in the presence of the vastness, the splen- 
dor, the mysterious depth and the boundless 
glory of the heavens, as seen at night. — 

When I see Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, 
The moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained ; 
What is man, that Thou art mindful of him, 
And the son of man, that Thou visitest him ? 

As Dr. Whewell says, "The vault of the 
sky arched at a vast and unknown distance over 
our heads ; the stars apparently infinite in num- 
ber, each keeping its appointed course and 
place, and seeming to belong to a wide system 



j6 THE PSALTER. 

which has no relation to the earth ; while man is 
but one among many millions of the earth's in- 
habitants, all this makes the contemplative spec- 
tator feel how exceeding small a portion of the 
universe he is ; how little he must be in the 
eyes of an Intelligence which can embrace the 
whole." And it may well be doubted whether 
the brilliant discoveries of modern astronomy 
cause the view of the nightly heavens to make 
any deeper impression upon a modern spectator 
than it did upon the sweet singer of Israel ages 
ago. Even we can hardly say with more emo- 
tion than David, What is man in the sight of 
Him who made those heavens, and in them 
planted those glittering orbs ? But no sooner 
does the poet give utterance to the thought of 
man's insignificance on this side of the subject, 
than he turns to set forth on the other, his won- 
drous greatness — in nature almost divine, 
crowned and sceptered as a king, wielding a 
dominion over air and earth, and seas — all 
things put under his feet. The first theme of 
the lyric is the manifested excellence of the 
Creator, so conspicuously displayed in all the 
earth, and in the heavens above the earth, as to 
attract the admiration of children, and even 
sucklings. But the second is the dignity of 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN.\ 77 

man, made by the favor of God to be the head 
of creation, animate and inanimate. Little as 
he is in one sense, in another he is inexpressi- 
bly great — nothing less than a sovereign ruler 
like his Maker and Lord. Thus was anticipated 
in the old Hebrew song, the fine thought of 
Pascal — " Man is but a reed, the weakest in 
nature, but he is a thinking reed. It is not 
necessary that the entire universe arm itself to 
crush him. A breath of air, a drop of water, 
suffices to kill him. But were the universe to 
crush him, man would be still more noble than 
that which kills him, because he knows that he 
dies ; and the universe knows nothing of the 
advantage it has over him/' 

But while the Psalms wholly ignore all theo- 
ries of man as an emanation or a development, 
and set him on the pinnacle of the earth as a 
creature bearing the lineament of the divine 
handiwork ; yet on the other hand they are far 
from affirming that his moral character is in 
accordance with his origin and his place in 
nature. Nay, they declare just the reverse. 
In the Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle sets 
forth his grand indictment against the race — 
that Jews and Gentiles are all alike under sin 
— and then rivets his conclusion by citations 



78 THE PSALTER. 

from Scripture— " it is written, " giving a cento 
of six different passages. Four of these are 
from the Psalter. It will suffice to quote the 
most striking of them — the opening of the 14th 
Psalm, which is also the same as that of the 
53d — a case of repetition or retractatio, which 
is well justified by the importance of the theme, 
and the indisposition of men to receive it. 

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. 

They are corrupt, they have done abominable works. 

There is none that doeth good. 

The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, 

To see if there be any that understand, 

That seek after God. 

They are all gone aside, they are together become filthy, 

There is none that doeth good, no, not one. 

The Psalmist, doubtless, had an historical 
occasion for this utterance, although we can not 
determine what it was. But rising above any 
particular circumstances, he surveys the whole 
race and brands it with a fatal apostasy. Even 
the eye of the Omniscient, looking down from 
the height of heaven, fails to discern a single 
sinless person. Well says Ewald, " It would 
scarcely be possible for a great truth to be 
sketched in fewer or more striking outlines. " 
Yet the subject is not always treated in this 
objective way. Generally, it comes out, as we 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 



79 



should expect in lyrics, as a matter of experi- 
ence. There is no reference in all the Psalter 
to the origin of evil, or to our connection with 
the head of the race. But the deep doctrine of 
depravity, as hereditary, inborn, and all-pervad- 
ing, is distinctly set forth. In Psalm lviii. 3, 
David traces the corruption of his times back 
to original sin, to an evil germ infecting the 
nature even from birth. " The wicked are es- 
tranged from the womb : they go astray as 
soon as they be born, speaking lies." Still 
more affectingly is the same assertion made by 
him in regard to himself in Psalm li. 5, when 
bewailing the great transgression of his life. 
Not content with acknowledging his actual 
misdeeds, he goes back to the fountain from 
which they sprang — a corrupt nature. " Behold, 
I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my 
mother conceive me," This is not said in ex- 
tenuation of his conduct, but in aggravation of 
it — not as casting blame upon his mother — the 
shocking hypothesis which some writers have 
allowed themselves to frame — but as affirming 
that the poison of sin, instead of being restric^d 
to particular wrong acts, however many or 
gross, went down to the roots of his being, and 
affected the whole life and character. Not that 



8q THE PSALTER. 

this took away guilt as if sin were an involun- 
tary thing, for man's responsibility is constantly 
assumed — being given in this very Psalm as 
clearly as it is in every human consciousness. 
Need I recite other touching utterances, — 

If thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, 
O Lord, who should stand ? — (cxxx.) 

Or again,— 

Enter not into judgment with thy servant, 

For in thy sight shall no man living be justified. — (cxliii.) 

All, all need His pardoning mercy, and this not 
only for known, but unknown sins. " Who can 
discern His errors ? Cleanse Thou me from 
secret faults." These sayings are not due to 
poetic license or rhetorical exaggeration, but 
are the true utterances of a deep and real feel- 
ing. And as such they stand alone in litera- 
ture. Nowhere in the sacred anthology of 
Rome, Greece, Assyria, Persia, Hindustan, or 
China, do we find any equivalent to it. Not 
that these peoples were ignorant of the fact of 
human depravity and of its extent. How could 
they be ? What they saw within and around 
them/and all the records of the past, compelled 
them to feel and acknowledge that human 
nature was in a sad, disjointed condition. Phi- 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 8 1 

losophers could find no explanation of the uni- 
versal fact save in the idea of a general rooted 
depravity of the race. And many a poet has, 
like Ovid, deplored the inward conflict between 
inclination and conscience — the clear percep- 
tion of what is right, and yet the determined 
following of what is wrong. But all these ut- 
terances were more matters of speculation than 
of emotion. They were not so held by men as 
to shape their religious convictions, or to gov- 
ern their worship or their lives. The nearest 
approach I have seen to the Scripture utter- 
ance is in some of the Hindu hymns, of which 
the following is a specimen : 

" I am sin, I commit sin, my nature is sinful, and I am conceived 

in sin. 
Save me, O thou lotus-eyed, O Hari, who removest all sin." 

These words have a very orthodox sound, 
and, being the daily prayer of the Brahmans, 
while performing their religious ablutions, 
have often been quoted to them by Chris- 
tian missionaries as asserting the great truth 
which renders the sacrifice of the Cross 
so needful and so precious. But neither did 
the ancient authors of this prayer, nor do those 
who incessantly repeat it now, mean by its 
words what it seems to us to say. Their phi- 



82 THE PSALTER. 

losophy attributes all the pain, the unsatisfied 
desire, the gloom and misery of human life, to 
the connection of soul with nature. The spirit 
is in bondage to matter, and the only prospect 
of emancipation lies in an enormous series of 
successive transmigrations until at last it passes 
into the Supreme source — that is, God. It is 
easy to see that in this view the most complete 
and exhaustive confessions of sinfulness have a 
very different meaning from that which the 
same words express when used by believers in 
the Bible. The moral corruption which the 
Hindu bewails is not the consequence of his own 
act, or that of his legal representative, but of 
dispositions originating in the first construction 
of the body from the subtle elements of nature. 
It is, of course, impossible that the sense of re- 
sponsibility should be keen, or the reproaches 
of conscience severe. Nor is it surprising that 
men should come to believe that the sin which 
owes its being to the body is removed by mere 
bodily or external observances. A chief feature 
of the every-day worship of all Brahmans is to 
bathe in one of the sacred rivers, and while in 
the act, to repeat the prayer above cited. Their 
worship and their lives show that they have no 
proper conception of inbred corruption as this 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN, 83 

is felt by Christians. Their confessions, so mor- 
tifying in terms, are made without either shame 
or sorrow — indeed for the most part repeated 
merely as a matter of form. As Dean Church re- 
marks, {Early Sacred Poetry,^. 30), ''Though 
in these ancient hymns sin is confessed and its 
consequences deprecated, though they praise 
the righteous and denounce the deceitful and 
the wicked, there is but little to show what was 
the sin, and what constituted the righteousness. 
Of that moral conviction, that moral enthusiasm 
for goodness and justice, that moral hatred of 
wrong and evil, that zeal for righteousness, 
that anguish of penitence which has elsewhere 
marked religious poetry, there is singularly lit- 
tle trace/' 

It may, then, be fairly affirmed that the ethnic 
faiths scarcely understood the strict idea of sin 
as an offence against God. They had no ink- 
ling of that view of the Divine Holiness which 
pervades the Scriptures, and which was con- 
tinually and strongly represented in a tangible 
shape to Israel, alike by the minute and painful 
symbolism of the ceremonial institute ; by the 
stern and unbending enactments of the moral 
law ; and by the actual and repeated judgments 
God sent both upon them and upon their 



84 THE PSAL TER. 

heathen neighbors in upholding the Law. Even 
in the master-pieces of Greek Tragedy, the 
Nemesis is not so much the result of the delib- 
erate purpose of a supreme divine person as 
the acting of a blind unconscious Fate to which 
gods and men are alike subject. There is a 
plenty of pathos, of terror, of wrong-doing, and 
of ultimate suffering, but never once the spirit- 
ual conception of sin as a disease of the moral 
nature needing both pardon and renovation in 
order to free the conscience from its load. And 
why? How comes it that the varied and cul- 
tivated races with an ancestral faith, with an 
elaborate cultus, and with a very striking men- 
tal development, never, save in very rare in- 
stances, looked deep enough into their own 
hearts to see what was there, while these He- 
brew singers had such a vivid conception of the 
truth, and expressed it with such feeling and 
power, and never set forth any statements of 
an opposite kind? It is no answer to ascribe 
this effect to the moral earnestness of the He- 
brew race. For first, the other races had as 
much earnestness, only they showed it in a dif- 
ferent way. When did any people fall into 
such a paroxysm of dismay, terror, and wrath, 
as the Athenians at the mutilation of the Her- 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 85 

mae ; or as the Egyptians, when Cambyses mock- 
ed at their sacred customs ? What people 
could be more earnest in their religion than 
those Syrian tribes who made their children 
pass through the fire to Moloch ? But, sec- 
ondly, if they did not have it, it remains to be 
explained how the Hebrews alone came to be 
in possession of it. The only possible solution 
is, I submit, to be found in the direct and spe- 
cific divine revelation which they enjoyed, and 
which, by furnishing the pure and lofty stan- 
dard of duty, enabled men to ascertain exactly 
their deviations from it. 

This view of human nature gave rise to 
another peculiarity by which the Hebrew Lyrics 
are distinguished, viz. : that their praise is 
always of God or of God's works, and never of 
man. The earlier history of the race abounds 
with men of remarkable character : the innocent 
Abel ; the unworldly Enoch ; the faithful Noah ; 
the mysterious Melchizedek ; Abraham, the 
friend of God ; the contemplative Isaac ; Jacob, 
the wrestler and prince ; Joseph with his diversi- 
fied and romantic history ; Moses, the law-giver, 
with his wondrous career from the bulrushes of 
the Nile to the lonely summits of Nebo ; Aaron, 
the head of the oldest priesthood in the world ; 



86 THE PSALTER. 

Joshua, the great captain ; Jephthah and Gideon, 
the mighty men of valor ; and Samuel, last of the 
judges and first of the prophets. These names 
were rooted in the hearts and the memories of 
their countrymen, and all regarded them with a 
glow of national pride. 

Why do not these appear in the song- 
book of the nation ? Why do we not find some 
encomiastic, or triumphal, or elegiac odes in 
honor of these distinguished men ? Why in all 
the Psalter is there nothing in this respect even 
approaching the sublime odes in which Pindar 
immortalized the victors at the great games of 
Greece ? That the fact is as I have stated, is 
indisputable. There is not a psalm of praise in 
the entire collection which has for its chief, or 
even its subordinate, subject, the exploits of any 
man or set of men. The spirit of the whole is 
faithfully expressed by the opening words of the 
115th Psalm, "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto 
us, but unto Thy name give glory, for Thy mercy, 
for Thy truth." It may, perhaps, be said that 
all poems of this kind were recorded in the book 
of Jasher, or of the Upright, which js mentioned 
in Joshua x. 13, and 2 Samuel i. 18, and of 
which nothing is certainly known, although for 
ages its precise nature has been a theme of 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 87 

laborious disputation. To me the opinion of 
Lowth appears most probable — that it was a 
collection of national songs, celebrating either 
the civil or the military exploits of the great 
men of the past. But admitting this to be the 
fact in the case, the question at issue is pushed 
only a step farther back. For supposing these 
two collections to be growing up side by side, 
how came it to pass that the secular never even 
by chance invaded the sacred, but the line of 
demarkation was kept distinct from beginning 
to end ? And why was it that the one perished 
so entirely that we know not of its existence at 
all, except by two slight references in the canoni- 
cal Scriptures, while the other was at once taken 
into the canon, and has so remained for ages 
an integral part of the Hebrew Scriptures ? 
Certainly this is not the ordinary course of 
events. * Pride of ancestry and pride of race are 
universal features of human nature. We find 
them in all modern, in all ancient literatures — in 
the lyrics of Greece and Rome, in the hymns of 
the Veda, in the Gathas of the Avestan, in the 
cuneiform inscriptions of Chaldea and Assyria. 
If, then, the book of Jasher was what it is com- 
monly supposed to be, it only makes the case 
stronger. The Hebrews did not omit to pre- 



88 THE PSALTER. 

serve songs in praise of illustrious men, because 
they had none of that class ; but on the con- 
trary, having them and enough of them to make 
a " book," they yet refused to mingle them with 
the songs of Zion, and kept their sacred anthol- 
ogy pure from even the least taint of hero wor- 
ship, or saint worship. This is clearly estab- 
lished by one signal case. On the death of Saul 
and Jonathan, David composed one of the most 
exquisite elegies of any age or land. It is re- 
corded in the second book of Samuel (i. 17-27) 
as part of the annals of the time, and as useful 
in many directions. But it was not put into the 
Psalter, it was not inscribed " To the chief musi- 
cian." Neither its author, nor its subject, nor 
its occasion, nor its inherent beauties of thought 
and expression, could gain for it admission into 
that collection whose title is Thehillim — Praises, 
the Praises of God. Nor may it be said that 
there were not in Jewish history events or 
scenes sufficiently striking to be embalmed in 
poetic numbers. The record proves the con- 
trary abundantly. The material existed, but 
some unseen force hindered the singers from 
using it in any such way as would turn men's 
thoughts from their Makers honor to the glori- 
fication of mere men, as may be seen by com- 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. gg 

paring the treatment of a celebrated modern 
feat of arms with that of a similar one of old. 
The brilliant exploit of the British cavalry at 
Balaklava has been worthily perpetuated in 
Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, and 
multitudes who otherwise might never have 
heard of the brave deed, will know it well from 
the poet's striking lyric. But the three captains 
who broke through the ? garrison at the well of 
Bethlehem did quite as glorious an enterprise 
in snatching at the risk of life a cup of water for 
David, and their self-sacrifice was even sur- 
passed by the generous devotion of their leader, 
but not the remotest allusion to it occurs in the 
Psalter. 

Still further, not only is there no attempt at 
the glorification of real personages in the na- 
tional history, but no appearance of an effort 
after an ideal of humanity, a mystic conception 
of what is greatest and best according to earthly 
standards. Among every cultivated people it 
has been a favorite object of men of genius to 
give expression to some faultless model of the 
race, to paint a perfect picture of godlike virtue, 
wisdom, courage, ' self-control, and endurance, 
and to hold this up for imitation and admiration. 
In all such poems it is required that they be 



90 



THE PSALTER. 



true to human nature generically, but not in de- 
tail. They borrow indeed from actual history, but 
they add and omit, and expand and diversify, 
until they have finally created their ideal char- 
acter. But however skilfully drawn, whatever 
excellence the work has in tone, style, and struc- 
ture, it is only a romance. It may have the 
highest possible verisimilitude, but still no ob- 
jective truth. " No such embodiment of the 
Ideal has ever broken in upon the vulgar real- 
ities of human existence. There have been 
good men, and brave men, and wise men, often ; 
but there have been no living sculptures after 
the fashion of Phidias, no heroes after the 
manner of Homer and Virgil. " Nothing of this 
kind appears in the Psalter. It is as free from 
any imaginary or mythical heroes as from any 
that are historical. Its whole atmosphere is 
that of literal truth — reciting of men, even the 
best of men, their shame as well as their glory, 
their sins, and falls, and infirmities as well as 
their faith, and heroism, and devotion. The 
only apparent exception to this uniformity is the 
reference to one described sometimes as a king, 
at others as a prophet, who is indeed set forth 
as invested with every possible excellence. 
But this is not a real exception. For although 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 



91 



a certain school of Rationalists have endeavored 
to account for these passages, and others in the 
rest of the Old Testament, as representing an 
ideal Christ, an earth-born conception of men 
dissatisfied with what they saw around them, 
and therefore striving to give a concrete picture 
of what they hoped would be developed in the 
progress of society, the attempt has signally 
failed. The theory is totally inadequate to an- 
swer its purpose, as might be easily shown were 
there time. And the old view remains impreg- 
nably established — that this lyric hero, so far 
from being of human invention, is of divine sug- 
gestion. He is the great hope of Israel, a real 
personage who in the fulness of time should 
appear to bridge the chasm between heaven 
and earth by a wondrous Incarnation, Upon 
the glories of this Being the sacred singers ex- 
haust all their stores. But the bright portraiture 
they give of Him only displays the more clearly 
their absolute restraint from any degree or form 
of panegyric upon a mere man. 

But while the Psalms are free from all secular, 
eulogistic songs in praise of individuals, and 
while they freely speak of the whole race as in 
a lost and sinful condition, they are far from any 
pessimistic extravagance. There is none of the 






9 2 



THE PSALTER. 



hopelessness of heathenism or mere nature. 
Men have gone astray, but they may be re- 
covered. They are burdened with guilt, but 
that burden may be shifted. They are banished 
from God, yet they may be brought back to His 
fellowship. For along with the clearest state- 
ments of human sin, we have similar statements 
of the divine mercy. " The Lord is merciful 
and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in 
kindness. He will not always chide, neither 
keep His anger forever." In consequence of 
this, penitents have hope. And it is these re- 
peated, express, and emphatic affirmations of 
the divine compassion which distinguish the 
Psalms from the Vedas and the Avestan. What 
in the latter is set forth vaguely, rarely, and 
hesitatingly, in the former is triumphantly as- 
sumed and made the basis of prayer and assur- 
ance. A conspicuous instance is seen in the 
103d Psalm : 

He hath not dealt with us after our sins, 

Nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. 

For as the heaven is high above the earth, 

So great is His mercy toward them that fear Him. 

As far as the east is from the west, 

So far hath He removed our transgressions from us. 

Like as a father pitieth his children, 

So the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. 

For He knoweth our frame ; 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 



93 



He remembereth that we are dust. 
For the wind passe th over it, and it is gone, 
And the place thereof shall know it no more ; 
But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlast- 
ing upon them that fear Him, 
And His righteousness unto children's children. 

In consequence of such utterances as these, 
the singers of old, without having the full- 
orbed doctrine of atonement as it lies in the 
New Testament, were able to apprehend God 
as gracious and forgiving, and yet to feel His 
grace, not as a license to sin, but as a fresh bond 
to duty. As one of them said, "There is for- 
giveness with Thee that Thou mayest be fear- 
ed." The forgiveness takes away the estrange- 
ment wrought by sin, and the soul comes back 
to its old place as a child of God and a sharer in 
His image. It loves Him, it serves Him, it 
enjoys Him. His statutes are more precious 
than gold, sweeter than the honey-comb. It 
meditates therein by day and by night. Its 
cry is, " Because thou hast been my help, there- 
fore in the shadow of Thy wings will I rejoice/' 
" How precious also are Thy thoughts unto me, 

God ? How great is the sum of them ! If 

1 should count them, they are more in number 
than the sand ; when I awake, I am still with 
Thee." 



94 



THE PSALTER. 



Now, this is a phase of experience to which 
all ancient literature has nothing that even ap- 
proaches an analogy. It may be said of some 
of the hymns of the Veda that their writers 
were seekers after God, but they were not find- 
ers. The highest idea they formed of what 
God could bestow was earthly, temporal bless- 
ings — life, health, riches, success. Whereas, 
in the Psalms we have a conception of the true 
blessedness of "the human soul, not surpassed 
even in the New Testament. They seem to 
have anticipated the fine saying of Augustine — 
"Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart 
hath no rest until it rest in Thee." See in the 
16th Psalm — "The Lord is the portion of my 
inheritance and my cup." Not what He gives or 
promises, but Himself. He is more and better 
than all His gifts. Just as the eye was formed 
for light, and the ear for sound, and the intellect 
for truth — and these organs can find pleasure 
only in their respective objects — so the soul 
was formed by God for Himself, and can never 
know real and abiding enjoyment except in 
Him. This undertone runs all through the 
Psalter, but sometimes comes to the surface in 
a very striking way. " There be many that 
say, who will shew us any good ? " (iv. 6). 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 95 

Yes, for centuries after David, this was the 
burden of every philosophical inquiry, and 
many, many have been the answers ; yet, none 
has superseded His own simple and all- 
sufficient utterance — " Lord, lift Thou up the 
light of Thy countenance upon us." 

So, again, in the very remarkable Psalm of 
Asaph, in which the saint finds his faith stag- 
gered at seeing the prosperity of the wicked. 
Their eyes stand out with fatness, and they 
have more than heart could wish. It seems, 
therefore, as if all the pains of God's people 
have been thrown away. In vain have they 
washed their hands in innocency. But going 
into the Sanctuary, he sees their latter end, 
how they are brought to desolation as in a mo- 
ment, and all their prosperity vanishes like a 
dream. And thus the apparent mystery of 
Providence is explained. But there is more 
than this. The holy singer reaches a far 
higher point. Even supposing that there were 
no. such deadly retribution as he has been in- 
formed of, there is no need for him to envy the 
felicities of the wicked. The objects which 
they seek, and prize, and enjoy, are not what 
the believer needs. He has far more and 
better. 



9 6 



THE PSALTER. 



Whom have I in heaven but Thee ? 

And upon earth I desire none besides Thee. -^a^^ 

My flesh and my heart faileth ; 

But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. 

As Ewald says — " Though all else in heaven 
and earth should fail, the one true everlasting 
Friend abides." Has devout thought in any 
age ever soared to a loftier eminence ? Asaph 
does not fall into the Pantheistic abyss of the 
east, nor into the mystical absorption of the 
west ; but maintaining distinctly the Divine Per- 
sonality and his own, yet finds in the friendly 
union of the two, the reliance of a finite soul 
upon an infinite God — all that his heart can 
wish or his mind conceive. The book which 
contains that thought came from God. 

But was this high privilege confined only to 
the race to which belonged the men who set it 
forth ? Such a question has often been an- 
swered in the affirmative. There are many 
who speak disparagingly of the Old Testament, 
on the ground of its restricted views and mo- 
rose spirit, charging it with what they call a 
" narrow particularism," meaning by that a 
scornful antipathy toward the rest of mankind. 
Now, it is certainly true that the Psalms recog- 
nize and celebrate with grateful praise the pre- 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. gj 

eminence which God gave to Israel over other 
nations. How could they omit to confess what 
they owed to Him who had chosen them to be 
His covenant people, who had given them the 
revelation of His will, and manifested His gra- 
cious presence in the Sanctuary ? Hence, we 
read often such utterances as, — 

In Judah is God known, 

His name is great in Israel. — (lxxvi. 2). 

He made known His ways to Moses, 

His acts unto the children of Israel. — (ciii. 7). 

He declared to Jacob His word. 

His statutes and judgments to Israel. 

He hath not dealt so with any nation ; 

And His judgments, they know them not. — (cxlvii. 19, 20). 

Yet, it is observable that these statements 
are never made with any appearance of self- 
complacency, as if God's favors to them were 
bestowed as the reward of their own merit, but 
rather as incitements to thankfulness and praise 
and holy living. And so far from cherishing a 
narrow, clannish spirit, they are constantly on 
the outlook for the time when the blessings 
they enjoy shall become the common posses- 
sion of the race. Indeed, the spirit of the 
Psalms is but an expansion of what is given in 
the call of Abraham. He was segregated from 

5 



9 8 



THE PSAL TER. 



his kindred, and made the recipient of a special 
revelation. But why ? The very words of the 
promise indicate the world-wide scope of the ar- 
rangement — " In thy seed shall all the families 
of the earth be blessed/' So the sacred sing- 
ers believed, and so they sang. The contrast 
between them, and all other singers on this 
point, has often been remarked. In every lite- 
rature we find the tradition of a golden age. 
Men see so much of confusion and darkness 
in the moral order of the world in their own 
day, that the heart turns longingly to the con- 
ception of a nobler and better state of things 
in which truth and right shall prevail, and jus- 
tice accomplish its perfect work. But inva- 
riably the ethnic religions placed the blessed 
period of rest and peace in the past, when the 
human race was young. Here only did they 
find any basis for their visions, for when they 
undertook to forecast the future, it always 
seemed as if the world were waxing worse and 
^rorse. Not only so. They had no idea of 
the solidarity of the race. That is a concep- 
tion due only to the Scriptures. The first ap- 
proach to it was made in the time of Alexander 
the Great, who, by his vast conquests in Asia, 
and his endeavors to unify his empire by as- 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 



99 



similating Europeans and Asiatics, gave to 
thoughtful men the notion of a universal history. 
It is no wonder, therefore, that the heathen 
contemporaries of our Psalmists never looked 
forward to a universal reign of righteousness 
— never solaced the troubles of the present 
by glancing into the future. The whole con- 
ception lay outside of their sphere of thought. 
So much the more wonderful is it that the 
singers of a small secluded people, shut off 
from all others by the great sea on one 
hand, and the trackless desert on the other, 
and still more separated by an elaborate ritual 
which penetrated all points of character and 
usage, should yet lift themselves bodily out of 
these restrictions and widen their sympathies 
to take in all the children of men everywhere. 
That they did so, is beyond question. The 
connections in which they gave utterance to 
this expectation of the universal prevalence of 
truth and righteousness are manifold and vari- 
ous. Sometimes it is in the flush of some great 
victory, the experience of which suggests the 
thought of a far more glorious manifestation of 
Jehovah's victorious energy. For example, in 
Psalm xlvii., usually thought to have originated 



IOO THE PSALTER. 

in Jehoshaphat's triumph over Amnion and 
Edom, the poet begins, — 

O clap your hands, all ye peoples ; 

Shout unto God with the voice of triumph, 

thus summoning the whole gentile world to 
join in the praise. Then, after reciting God's 
doings, he concludes with predicting an assem- 
bly of the nations to do homage as vassals of 
their one Liege-lord and King : 

The princes of the peoples are gathered together, 

A people of the God of Abraham, 

For unto God belong the shields of the earth. 

So again in the remarkable 68th Psalm, 
after recounting God's blessings in the wilder- 
ness, under the judges, and at the foundation 
of the monarchy, David sees in these only the 
foreshadowings of a mightier and far more ex- 
tensive conquest : 

Because of thy temple at Jerusalem 
Kings shall bring presents unto thee. 

Princes shall come out of Egypt, 

Ethiopia shall eagerly stretch out her hands unto God : 

Kingdoms of the earth, sing unto God : 

Sing praises unto the Lord. 

Ascribe ye strength unto God, 
Over Israel is His majesty, 
And His strength in the clouds. 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. IOI 

This does not mean simply a subjugation of 
the heathen world for Israel's glory, but a sub- 
jection which should justly excite the joyful 
praises of all thus brought into the fellowship 
of truth. The same prospect is still more dis- 
tinctly set forth in the 87th Psalm, occasion- 
ed by Hezekiah's victory over Sennacherib. 
After an outburst celebrating the glory of Zion 
as the city of God, the poet proceeds to de- 
scribe her brilliant prospects, introducing God 
as enumerating among His willing people those 
who had always been fierce enemies of His 
cause. 

I will mention Rahab and Babylon as them that know me. 
Lo, Philistia and Tyre with Ethiopia. 
(Of each of these it shall be said), 
This one was born there (/. e., in Zion). 

Not individuals merely, but whole peoples are 
to be subjects of regenerating grace. And 
when Jehovah makes out the muster-roll of His 
nations, each of these shall find a place in the 
registry. Well may such an issue be commem- 
orated by a triumphal procession, headed by 
the singers and the players, saying, "All my 
springs are in thee." 

Another class of Psalms looking to the uni- 
versal diffusion of the truth, is found in the little 



102 THE PSALTER. 

fasciculus, comprising xciii.-c, which seem in- 
tended in times of darkness and doubt to raise 
the thoughts of the people up to the Lord as 
King, who will one day come forth to show His 
boundless power and authority. The floods 
lift up their voice, but far above the crash of 
their foaming billows is the Lord on high (xciii.) 

He is a great God and a great King above all Gods. — (xcv.) 

Give unto the Lord, ye families of nations, 

Give unto the Lord glory and strength. 

Let the sea roar and the fulness thereof ; 

The world and they that dwell therein. 

Let the floods clap their hands, 

Let the hills be joyful together 

Before the Lord : for He cometh to judge the earth : 

With righteousness shall He judge the world 

And the peoples with equity. 

Sea and land, rivers and mountains, are all 
summoned to praise in concert God's assump- 
tion of His universal sovereignty. Then the 
series concludes in Psalm ioo, with an invitation 
to the entire race to draw near, — 

Shout unto the Lord, all the earth. 
Serve the Lord with gladness, 
Come before Him with singing. 
Know that the Lord He is God, 
It is He that made us, 
And not we ourselves. 

Here are no local restrictions, no national 
exclusiveness, but a summons to every kindred 






THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 



IO3 



and tribe, on the ground that Jehovah is the 
one common Creator and Father of all. 

The same largeness of view is found in two 
other Psalms, very different in their origin and 
tone, the I02d and 67th. The former, justly 
entitled a prayer of the afflicted, begins with 
the description of a sad and bitter lot, but sud- 
denly the writer rises above his sorrows with 
the thought that God sits as King forever. 
This divine majesty will one day be manifested 
on Zion's behalf, and that so signally that na- 
tions shall fear the name of Jehovah, and all 
kings of the earth His glory. Not only that, 
but peoples and kingdoms shall be gathered 
together to unite with Israel in recounting Je- 
hovah's praise, and doing His will. In the 
latter Psalm all this comes out so striking- 
ly, that it has been called the Mission Hymn 
of the Hebrew Church. It is apparently 
a harvest song^ in which the devout singer 
takes occasion, from the recent experiences of 
God's goodness in sending a fruitful season, to 
entreat and to anticipate the extension of the 
divine bounties to all the nations of the earth. 

God be merciful to us and bless us, 
And make His face to shine upon us. 



104 THE PSALTER. 

Why ? Mark the large and generous words 
which immediately follow : 

That Thy way may be known upon the earth, 
Thy saving health among all nations. 
Let the peoples praise Thee, O God, 
Let all the peoples praise Thee. 

God even our own God, shall bless us. 

God shall bless us, 

And all the ends of the earth shall fear Him. 

Visions like these of universal peace and joy 
have now become the common property of 
man. They are a most agreeable relief against 
the tangled mazes and constant jars of ordi- 
nary life, and the wide separations and con- 
trasts of peoples and nations. And the poet 
laureate of England, has well voiced the sen- 
timents of our age in his anticipations of the 
period when 

The war drum throbs no longer and the battle-flags are furled 
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. 

And in his loud call, — 

Forward, forward, let us range. 

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of 

change : 
Through the shadow of the globe, we sweep into the younger 

day. 

Such an anticipation as this is so familiar as 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. T05 

to have become one of the commonplaces of 
human thought. All men look* forward to that 

One far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves. 

But it was another matter three thousand 
years ago. Then neither the reasonings of 
philosophers, nor the plans of statesmen, nor 
the dreams of poets took in so wide a range. 
They knew of kingdoms, and tribes, and races ; 
but of the human race as a whole, as bound to- 
gether by a common origin, a common nature, 
and a common destiny — of this they had not 
the remotest conception. It was left for a 
band of singers in small, obscure, despised Pal- 
estine to anticipate a reign of righteousness, 
which should unite all the children of men 
under one sceptre. And they set it forth not 
merely as a possible or desirable event, but as 
one certain to occur ; and they did this not 
simply in some favored moment of prophetic 
inspiration, but again and again — not only in 
one particular connection, but in a great variety 
of relations. The fact seems to have entered 
into the habitual current of their devout medi- 
tations, and they declare it in tones of the most 
absolute conviction and certainty. And when 
men now undertake to describe " the good time 



106 THE PSALTER. 

coming," they can find no better materials for 
their purpose than those furnished by the old 
Hebrew poets. The question recurs — What 
was it that lifted these men so greatly above 
all their contemporaries, and gave them such 
prescience of the far-distant future ? How did 
their thoughts come to take this direction, when 
there was nothing in their situation or sur- 
roundings to suggest it ? The only possible 
answer is found in the statement that they sang 
under a divine impulse. It is vain to remind us 
that the poet is a seer — that a sublime and 
fiery genius enables its possessor to see what 
escapes the notice of ordinary men. No genius 
was equal to a task like this. The Hebrews 
had in their immediate neighborhood a crowd 
of minor kingdoms, all idolatrous, debased, and 
sensual. On the south lay Egypt with its mas- 
sive temples, its stately ritual, its profound 
symbolism, and as bent upon its idols as it 
was in the days of Abraham. On the east 
were the great military empires upon the Ti- 
gris and Euphrates, which indeed changed 
from time to time as a new tribe or family 
came in the ascendant, but never showed any 
amelioration in faith or in morals. What up- 
lifting of mere human faculties could enable a 



THE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 



107 



Jew to foresee that all this imperial magnifi- 
cence would pass entirely away, and its elabo- 
rate and gorgeous idolatries utterly disappear, 
and that not only the people of these proud 
and ancient kingdoms, but all others, should be- 
come willing servants of the One True God ? 
The question answers itself. 

The same thing may be said of the teaching 
as to the individual man — How came these sing- 
ers of a comparatively unlettered race, widely 
separated from the intellectual life of the rest 
of mankind, and without the stimulus of great 
schools and philosophies, to describe so accu- 
rately man's glory and his shame ? Without 
elation they set forth his origin as the creature 
of God, the child of God, and little less than 
divine, superior to all else that the earth con- 
tains, and finding his truest honor and bless- 
edness in communion with his infinite Maker. 
On the other hand, in their tremendous im- 
peachment of human nature as fallen, we see not 
a trace of satire or cynicism. They say harder 
things than are found in Juvenal or Horace, or 
any of their imitators, but there is nothing that 
looks like misanthropy. Their intense earnest- 
ness is blended and balanced with a tenderness 
and compassion which forbid every malign emo- 



I0 8 THE PSALTER, 

tion. With the fall they see the possibility of 
restoration, and for this all needful provision is 
made in the disclosure of Jehovah's wonderful 
condescension and loving-kindness. 

This, then, is the trinity of truths respecting 
the race which are taught by the Psalter, with a 
precision, variety, fulness, and force, not sur- 
passed even by the New Testament. First, 
man's original position as a son of God by 
creation, stamped with his Maker's image, and 
endowed with His dominion over the animal 
world, but himself governed only by reason and 
conscience. Secondly, his subsequent fall from 
that high estate, so as to become the prey of 
sin and guilt, feeding on ashes, out of harmony 
with his God and with himself, a blind Samson 
groping amid the ruins of his original home, 
and pursued by the spectres of remorse and 
fear. Thirdly, the prodigal coming back from 
his long wandering, acknowledging with shame 
and blinding tears his sinful errors, caught up 
in a father's arms, restored to his old place in 
that father's heart, then through his fellowship 
with heaven, renewing his fellowship with 
earth, and seeing in all the countless tribes of 
the world his fellow-subjects of the Supreme 
Will, and his destined fellow-partakers in the 



I HE DOCTRINE OF MAN. 



IO9 



riches of the Divine Mercy. These truths no 
other set of men even thought out, much less 
made them their own by such a living experi- 
ence that they were uttered in poetry and song 
with pathos, with fiery energy, with sublime 
glory, with more than earthly beauty. Not 
one discordant note is heard in the whole col- 
lection. The reason, the only reason is that 
along with the poetic inspiration in these sweet 
singers of Israel, there was the afflatus of the 
Divine Spirit, and the Psalter came from God. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



LECTURE IV. 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 

THE DOCTRINE OF A MESSIAH PECULIAR TO THE OLD TESTA- 
MENT — HOW IT IS STATED IN THE PSALTER — THE SECOND 
PSALM— THE FORTY-FIFTH — THE SEVENTY-SECOND — THE 
ONE HUNDRED AND TENTH — THE TWENTY-SECOND — THE 
CHARACTER THUS DESCRIBED — UNLIKE THE HINDU AVA- 
TARA — THE PERSIAN SOSIOSH — NOT OF SUBJECTIVE ORIGIN 
— DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE — OF LITTLE VALUER se — 
KNOWN TO THE PSALMISTS — NOT DWELT UPON — HOW ITS 
PLACE WAS SUPPLIED — THE ARGUMENT SUMMED UP. 

THE fallen condition of man is not only a 
doctrine of Scripture, but a fact of universal 
experience and observation. All the religions 
of the heathen world bear witness to this fact, 
and to their own incompetency to deal with it. 
They could devise no effectual relief. Mankind 
yearned for that which it could not find, which 
in itself it did not possess. Neither mythology 
nor philosophy could give any assurance of re- 
demption. Men cried aloud to heaven, but they 

(113) 



U4 



THE PSAL TER. 



received no answer. The attempts even of the 
wisest and best, whether among Aryan or 
Semitic races, are not unfitly represented in the 
words of a living poet, — 

An infant crying in the night ; 
An infant crying for the light ; 
And with no language but a cry. 

It may be said, therefore, with truth, that the doc- 
trine of the Messiah, at least in any clearly de- 
veloped form, is peculiar to the Old Testament. 
There are indeed scattered through the Pagan 
mythologies obscure allusions to a future de- 
liverer, but nowhere is there anything to show 
that this conception held the place which it oc- 
cupied among the Hebrews, lying as it did at 
the very basis of their national existence, and 
giving shape and color to all their institutions. 
The first promise was uttered at the gates of 
Paradise ; it was renewed to Noah, the second 
father of the race ; it was the reason of the call 
of Abraham from Chaldea to Canaan ; it was 
perpetuated in his family ; it underlay the insti- 
tution of the priestly and prophetic orders in the 
Mosaic Cultus ; and finally it blossomed out in 
the monarchy established in the line of David. 
That is, by the time of this eminent man, the 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE 



"5 



history of the chosen people had been so 
developed, its ecclesiastical and political consti- • 
tution had become so fixed, and the cycle of its 
fortunes had been so diversified, that abundant 
material was furnished for expanding and illus- 
trating the Messianic Conception in every ap- 
propriate way. Accordingly, in the great era 
of lyric poetry which began with David, we 
should naturally expect to find this lofty national 
hope set forth. And so it is. There are no 
songs in praise of the national heroes, a nega- 
tive fact still more markedly exhibited in the 
hymn of Moses at the Red Sea, and that of De- 
borah upon the overthrow of Sisera. In neither 
is there any lauding of the human instruments 
of the triumph, but the entire glory is given to 
Israel's God. So the Psalter contains not a 
single paean in honor of any one illustrious per- 
sonage of earthly origin, from Abel and Enoch 
down to David and his mighty men. 

But it does contain a number of Psalms which 
celebrate in a peculiar and otherwise unexampled 
method the sufferings and the glories of one ex- 
traordinary personage. And they do this in 
such a way as to make it apparent that they are 
a fair expression of the national thought. They 
present to us predictions of the great future de- 



n6 THE PSALTER. 

liverer, not abstractly nor historically, not as 
belonging entirely to remote ages, but as a 
living hope in the present and as developed out 
of the existing experience of God's people. 
The hopes and fears, the trials and triumphs, 
the temptations and confessions and prayers and 
praises of believers, flowering into song and ut- 
tering themselves in that poetic form which al- 
ways seems most appropriate to deep emotion 
— it would indeed be strange, if these lyrics 
contained no reference to that which always was 
the ground-idea of the nation's existence. Nor 
is it wonderful that there are Psalms in which at 
first it is difficult to determine to what extent 
and according to what law they are pervaded by 
the Messianic element. The prophets, priests, 
and kings of the Old Testament were adumbra- 
tions of One who should comprehend in His own 
person all these offices. The nation itself was 
indissolubly connected with its future head, and 
on that account shared and anticipated his for- 
tunes. Hence there are so many instances in 
which language is used respecting the type 
which belongs only to the antitype, and others 
in which the singer almost insensibly passes 
from utterances appropriate only to himself or 
the people he represents, to utterances which 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



117 



necessarily suggest the thought of some one 
spotless, if not divine, with whom the people 
stand in intimate and mysterious union. But in 
all cases the drapery of the Psalms is native and 
national. There are no exotics in the garden 
of the Hebrew muse. The imagery is taken 
from the circumstances of the time and place ; 
and the poet expresses himself according to his 
training and experience. Hence the seemingly 
fragmentary character of the Messianic Psalms. 
No one of them gives a view of Messiah's whole 
person or work or character, but each one takes 
that portion or feature which needed at the time 
to be set forth, leaving it for future ages or the 
progress of events to adjust these separate 
statements into one harmonious and self-con- 
sistent portraiture. To quarrel with this ar- 
rangement is to quarrel with the entire system 
of lyric poetry, or with its use as a mode of 
Divine revelation. 

What, now, is the Messiah of the Psalms ? I 
propose to answer this, question by citing in 
succession some of the lyrics, which by imme- 
morial tradition, and by the almost concurrent 
voice of scholars of our own day, are admitted 
to refer chiefly, if not exclusively, to Christ. 
Let me begin with the Second, the most finish- 



Il8 THE PSALTER. 

ed and striking poem in the entire collection. 
Indeed I know of none in any language that 
surpasses it in regularity of structure and depth 
of poetic feeling. It consists of four strophes 
of equal length, each containing a distinct por- 
tion of the theme. In the first the poet hears 
the tramp of gathering armies, and as the tumult- 
uous host draws near, sees whole nations in 
revolt and recognizes the presumptuous words 
of their leaders. And so he breaks out in a 
question of wonder and horror, " Why do na- 
tions rage, and peoples imagine a vain thing ? 
Kings of the earth have set themselves, and 
princes have taken counsel against Jehovah and 
His anointed, saying, Let us break their bonds 
asunder, and cast their cords from us." Then 
all at once, in the second strophe, he lifts his 
eye far away from this tempest of confusion, 
and sees Jehovah seated upon His everlasting 
throne, mocking at the fatuity of His adversaries, 
and calmly announcing, to their terror and con- 
fusion, that He had set His king upon His holy 
hill. Then in the third strophe, by a sudden and 
most dramatic change of speakers, the anointed 
king comes in, affirming, on the authority of 
Jehovah, his own Divine Sonship, the grant to 
him of a strictly universal dominion, and of 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



II 9 



power to exercise that dominion, whether in 
wrath or in mercy. Lastly, in the fourth strophe, 
the poet summons kings and judges to desist 
from their hopeless enterprise, and kissing the 
Son to experience the blessedness of all who 
take refuge in Him. It seems to be plain that 
the person here described could not possibly be 
David or any of his line. The boundaries of 
the promised land had been definitely fixed by 
the Divine Word, and were never exceeded in 
fact ; but here is a covenant that Jehovah's 
anointed Son should have and exercise an un- 
limited dominion, on the ground of which 
earthly rulers indiscriminately are advised to 
yield Him implicit obedience. 

In the Forty-fifth Psalm, this mighty ruler re- 
appears. He is girded with a sword. He rides 
forth prosperously. His arrows are sharp, and 
peoples fall under Him, But the poet celebrates 
with emphasis the moral groundwork of this 
dominion. The Conqueror is beautiful beyond all 
human standard or comparison, i. e. y invested 
with every moral and spiritual attraction. Grace 
is poured into His lips. He loves righteousness 
and hates iniquity. For this reason God 
anoints Him and blesses Him forever. Nay, He 
is even addressed as divine — "Thy throne, O 



120 THE PSALTER. 

God, is forever and ever." But this King has a 
bride richly dressed in gold inwoven garments, 
who, loaded with gifts and followed by virgins, 
enters with music and song into the palace, 
where the dynasty thus established is to have 
perpetual succession and endless fame. Here 
is a plain reference to the familiar figure used all 
through the sacred Scriptures, by which the 
relation between God and His people, and so 
between Christ and His Church, is represented 
as a conjugal tie. To consider the Psalm as a 
glowing epithalamium upon the marriage of a 
mere earthly monarch, is simply absurd. No king 
of the Hebrew, or of any other race, ever found- 
ed his title to his throne simply upon his moral 
qualities, his love of truth, meekness and right- 
eousness. Yet this is preeminently the case 
here. Because the King is so upright, God 
bestows upon Him an eternal blessing, and na- 
tions give Him thanks forever. 

The same point is somewhat differently elab 
orated in the Seventy-second Psalm. Here is 
described by Solomon a superhuman King whose 
empire far transcends his own. It reaches 
from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends 
of the earth, i. e., from each frontier of the 
promised land to the remotest regions of the 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. \ 2 \ 

known world in the opposite quarter : from the 
Mediterranean to the ocean that washes the 
shores of Eastern Asia, and from the Euphrates 
to the utmost west. Before its ruler, all who 
are most inaccessible to the arms of Israel, 
hasten to tender their voluntary submission. 
The wild sons of the desert, the merchants of 
Tarshish, the islanders of the Mediterranean, 
the Arab chiefs, the wealthy Ethiopians, are 
foremost in proffering their homage and fealty. 
But this is not enough. All kings are to fall 
down before Him — all nations are to do Him 
service. His empire is to be coextensive with 
the world, and is to last while the moon endures. 
He Himself may be out of sight, but His Name 
will endure forever — that name will propagate 
itself as long as the sun shines, and men shall 
be blessed in Him to the end of time. Yet this 
kingdom is spiritual ; it confers peace upon the 
world only by righteousness. Its Head has 
profound sympathy with the poor and the help- 
less. Hq hears the cry of every human heart ; 
He brings relief to every human sufferer. So 
that His appearance is like the rain upon the 
mown grass, like showers that water the earth. 
He is formidable only to oppressors, whom He 
breaks in pieces ; but the needy, the afflicted, 
6 



122 THE PSALTER. 

and the friendless, are the objects of His pecul- 
iar care. And it is upon this fact, upon the 
equity and grace of the King, that the univer- 
sality and perpetuity of His kingdom are 
founded. 

Yet again, we meet with this lofty personage 
in the One Hundred and Tenth Psalm. Here 
He is introduced at once, as sitting on the right 
hand of Jehovah, as the partner of His dignity 
and power. Exalted thus, He has enemies, but 
they are doomed to a remediless overthrow. 
Nations and kings and the wide earth shall feel 
the resistless rod of His strength. When He 
musters His host, His people willingly offer 
themselves for the service, clad not in earthly 
armor, but in the beauties of holiness. And 
they come in countless multitude and never-end- 
ing succession, like dewdrops from the womb of 
the morning. But their ruler is Priest as well 
as King; — not Levitical, nor Aaronic, but of 
that older order, which in the person of the 
mysterious Melchizedek had been honored even 
by the Father of the faithful. According to this 
lofty type, the Messiah has neither beginning of 
days nor end of life, but sits forever a priest 
upon His throne. And He is Priest-king mani- 
festly in order that some work of expiation 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



123 



may be accomplished by which His people shall 
become prepared to offer themselves willingly 
to His service, and thus be worthy of sharing in 
His universal conquests. In this double capaci- 
ty, uniting the two functions, regal and sacerdo- 
tal, which to the Jewish mind always stood 
separate and distinct, the consecrated Monarch 
sets forth against His foes. When wearied in 
the pursuit, like Gideon's warriors He refreshes 
Himself with water from the brook, and marches 
on, conquering and to conquer. 

But the image of the Priest suggesting as it 
does the thought of sacrifice, reminds us of 
another order of ideas respecting the Messiah 
which might naturally be expected to occur in 
the Psalms. Accordingly from these bright 
and glowing pictures - of regal majesty and 
power and victory, I turn back toward the be- 
ginning of the collection, where we find quite a 
new conception of the entire subject. It is in the 
Twenty-second Psalm, the song upon Aijeleth 
Shahar, the hind of the morning, a title, in which 
it is with some probability supposed that the 
hindvs a poetical figure for persecuted innocence* 
and the morning (literally, dawn) for deliverance 
after long distress. The lyric concludes with a 
graphic picture of the same universal prevalence 



124 



TER. 



of truth and right already presented, but comes 
to it in a very different way. The clash of arms 
is not heard once, nor the blare of trumpets. 
The opening words are the cry of a sufferer 
pleading for help. Apparently abandoned by 
heaven and earth, He is in the last extremity. 
Furious enemies assail Him on every side, while 
He Himself is wasted away, His body reduced to 
a skeleton, His hands and His feet pierced ; and 
as He is thus hovering on the brink of death, 
His foes feast their eyes on the spectacle and 
cast lots over His raiment. But just here His 
loud cry for help passes into a confident antici- 
pation of deliverance. The consequences of 
this deliverance will be universal and everlast- 
ing. The rescued sufferer will thank and praise 
God among all the seed of Israel, so that their 
heart shall live forever. Not only so, but He 
will perform His vows by suitable offerings and 
sacrifices, and to the joyful eucharistic table 
thus spread shall come not only His brethren, 
but all kindreds of the nations from one end of 
the earth to the other. The rich and the poor alike 
shall gather to the festive assembly. Nor shall 
the celebration cease with the contemporary 
race, but go down from age to age to genera- 
tions yet unborn. For the Kingdom is the 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



125 



Lord's, and He is Governor among the na- 
tions. 

Such is the substance of five Messianic 
Psalms. There is a score or more besides, the 
recital of which would add to the liveliness and 
the fulness of the delineation, but there is not 
time to cite them. For the same reason I have 
not entered upon nice questions of exegesis, nor 
attempted to explain or defend the principles 
upon which the utterance of these far-reaching 
predictions is reconciled with the character and 
condition of their respective authors. Nor is 
it any part of the plan to found an argument 
upon the fulfilment of prophecy as shown by the 
correspondence between many of the detailed 
expressions of the Psalter, and the recorded life 
and death and resurrection of our blessed Lord. 
This is an interesting and fruitful theme, but it 
does not belong here. All that concerns the 
present argument is simply the existence of 
these remarkable poems in a popular lyric 
collection of the Hebrew people, largely and 
constantly used in their social and public wor- 
ship. I have analyzed their contents and briefly 
stated their general meaning, as it is ascertained 
by the fixed laws of language. Nor does this 
statement rest simply upon the authority of the 



126 THE PSALTER. 

New Testament Had that book never been 
written, these Psalms would necessarily have 
the same meaning as has been attributed to 
them. The question, then, recurs, how are we 
to account for such a peculiar phenomenon in 
literature ? We are dealing, not with prose, but 
with poetry ; not with a stately epic, but with 
verses intended to be sung. We are brought 
into contact with the throbbing heart of a people 
giving free utterance to all its hopes and fears, 
its recollections and its anticipations, in its 
relations to God. Here is a distinct class 
of sacred odes, which, leaving aside both 
the past and the present, distinctly points 
to the future, and declares the coming of 
One who is to introduce the reign of universal 
truth and peace. While He is invested with 
irresistible might, and wields an iron sceptre, 
yet He is Himself personally an example of rec- 
titude and truth and grace, and the whole force 
of His administration turns in this direction. 
He overthrows the proud and the wicked, but 
is a shelter to all the humble poor. He starts 
from the holy hill of Zion ; He is a product of 
the Jewish race ; He is to sit upon David's 
throne; but His blessings — not simply His au- 
thority, but the benefits He confers — are to be 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



127 



felt to the end of the earth. He is, too, not only 
a king, but a priest, and in some undefined way 
His sufferings are connected with His triumph ; 
so that the former are the cause of the latter. 
Of course, in our day, we understand the ex- 
act nature of this connection, for we have the 
words of Him who expounded the things writ- 
ten of Him in the Law of Moses, and in the 
Prophets, and in the Psalms (Luke xxiv. 44), 
and who said to the two disciples on the way 
to Emmaus — " Ought not Christ to have suf- 
fered these things, and to enter into His 
glory ? " (xxiv. 26). The contemporaries of 
David had no such illumination, but they had 
the record, from which they could scarcely fail 
to infer that moral causes lay at the foundation 
of the Messianic Empire, and that humiliation 
must precede exaltation. Whence, then, did 
this conception originate ? It was not an im- 
portation from any other race or faith, for no 
other had it. The last hundred years have 
thrown a flood of light upon all the literature 
and traditions of the ancient nations of East- 
ern and Central Asia. Neither Egyptians, nor 
Brahmans, nor Buddhists, nor Confucianists, nor 
Parsees, nor Accads, nor Chaldeans, ever form- 
ed a conception of a future deliverer approach- 



128 THE PSALTER. 

ing the Hebrew notion, in distinctness, in pu- 
rity, in tenderness, in universality. Their views 
were distorted by mythological legends or ab- 
surd fancies. Compare the Hindu Avatara as 
given in the Sanscrit Scriptures. Vishna is rep- 
resented as coming into the world in ten, 
some say twenty-four, successive transforma- 
tions, for the purpose of redressing wrong and 
preserving the creation. These consist of a 
series of hideous physical generations in the 
shape of a fish, a tortoise, a boar, a lion, a 
dwarf, etc., in all of which metamorphoses there 
is a boundless store of legendary words and 
deeds, but all of them destitute of any spiritual 
meaning or moral purpose. What resemblance 
is there between these grotesque and often im- 
moral developments, and the picture of a wise, 
and just, and benignant, and glorious king, 
formidable only to the wicked, and at last gath- 
ering high and low, rich and poor, under one 
peaceful sceptre ? There is, indeed, some re- 
semblance in the Sosiosh of the Avestan — the 
expected deliverer of the Perso-Aryan race, 
who, when evil had reached its final stage, was 
to appear, and by a process of resurrection and 
judgment, destroy at last all the wicked, purge 
out the dross from created nature, and gather 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. \ 2 g 

the whole race of man on a new-born earth to 
sing the glory of Ormazd and the Amshas- 
pands. But this part of the Zendic Scriptures 
belongs, if not to post- Christian, certainly to a 
very late period in the development of Zoroas- 
ter's doctrine, and therefore is generally and 
justly supposed to have been a reproduction of 
views borrowed from the Jews, whose writings 
we know were widely disseminated all through 
the East after the first overthrow of Babylon. 
Where, then, did the Jews get the brilliant con- 
ception of a Messiah, so inwrought into the lit- 
erature and the life of the people, that it rang 
constantly in the choruses of the temple, and 
was the sheet-anchor of the nation in every 
time of trial — the pivot of their firmest hopes, 
and the key to all their Scriptures ? Modern 
writers make its origin human and subjective. 
They say it was the joint product of the misfor- 
tunes of the times and the theocratic consti- 
tution — the experience of a felt want in this and 
other instances exciting the imagination to fill 
up the blank out of its own resources. But 
how can this theory, however ingeniously 
wrought out, explain the Psalms we have been 
considering ? These are all of the Davidic or 
Solomonic period, when the nation was united 
6* 



I30 THE PSALTER. 

under one head, in a state of great prosperity, 
and with boundaries equalling the widest range 
ever mentioned in the original grant of Canaan. 
What subjective considerations could have led 
writers in that age, when even the idea of a 
universal history was unknown, to conceive of 
a monarch who, by divine appointment, should 
go forth from Zion and rule literally all the 
earth, who should do this in the strictest exer- 
cise of righteousness, and should introduce a 
peaceful state of general prosperity, and yet 
combining priestly with kingly functions, should 
in some way suffer the extremest sorrow as the 
prelude of His signal and eternal triumph ? No 
known laws of human nature will account for 
such a result, and no similar case can be fur- 
nished from all the records of human expe- 
rience. It follows, therefore, that these Psalms 
were divinely suggested. 

From the Messiah I pass to the doctrine of 
a Future Life in the Psalms. The absence 
of full and explicit reference to this subject has 
not unfrequently been a source of perplexity, 
even to believers. If the Psalter is the one 
divinely appointed Liturgy of the Church in all 
ages ; if its fervent ritual of devotion was intend- 






THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



131 



ed to revolve within the circle of every-day pains, 
fears, and solaces of our earthly pilgrimage, and 
furnish the fittest material for prayer, praise, 
trust, and hope, why is there so little reference 
to the final outcome of our present life, to the 
better world beyond the grave ? In answer to 
this question it may be observed : 

(1). That the doctrine of Immortality {per se) 
is far from deserving the emphasis which has 
been placed upon it. It is very true that the ab- 
sence of the belief is a serious reproach. One 
can hardly sufficiently reprobate the crude mate- 
rialism which at the present day, and often under 
the pretence of relying upon the results of sci- 
entific investigation, coolly dismisses all thought 
of a life to come as a mere dream, pleasing in- 
deed, and affording an agreeable excitement to 
the imagination, but utterly destitute of any 
rational basis. Far better is the stout assertion 
of Max Muller, that " the sine qua non of all real 
religion, is a belief in immortality and in per- 
sonal immortality, without which religion is like 
an arch resting upon one pillar— like a bridge 
ending in an abyss." Whoso holds that man, 
when the breath leaves the body, perishes like 
the beasts, is in great danger of coming to act 
upon the beastly-maxim, " Let us eat and drink, 



132 



THE PSALTER. 



for to-morrow we die." But it does not follow 
from this, that all who are persuaded that there 
is a future life are necessarily possessors of 
a pure, or elevated, or satisfying theology. 
There are numerous examples to the contrary, 
alike among nations of the highest refinement 
and among tribes of wandering savages. In 
ancient Egypt we have the best developed con- 
ception of man's immortality which any of the 
heathen attained — one that included the ethical 
ideas of judgment and retribution. Yet this 
did not save its holders from the grossest forms 
of polytheism. For they worshipped even brute 
animals — a custom which provoked the scorn 
not only of Christians, but of the heathen. The 
words of Clement of Alexandria are familiar ; 
speaking of a visitors disappointment when 
passing through the long and stately propylons 
and halls of a magnificent temple gleaming with 
jewels and gold, till he reached at last the most 
holy recess, a veil was drawn aside and reveal- 
ed the god, in the shape of a bull, or a cat, or 
a crocodile, or a serpent! Plutarch before 
him reprobated this animal-worship as a fit 
subject of laughter and ridicule. Among the 
Fijians of the South Sea, the belief of immor- 
tality led to the most revolting bloodshed ; for 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE 



133 



arguing that man's state after death will be 
precisely that in which he was when he died, 
they destroyed their parents, and sometimes 
themselves, while in full health and strength, in 
the hope of thus escaping here and hereafter 
the evils of age and decrepitude. And Living- 
stone mentions numerous tribes of Central Africa 
who, when a chief dies, slaughter a number of 
his slaves to be his companions in the other 
world. So the wild tribes of North America 
all held firmly that there was a future life, but 
almost the only result was to intensify the 
gloom and terror which belong to all natural 
religions. It is clear, then, that there is no 
religious character and no ethical importance 
in this much-lauded tenet. All depends upon 
the other doctrines with which it is associated. 
(2). That it was known and held by the 
authors of the Psalms is very evident. Their 
fathers must have learned it during their long 
stay in Egypt, where it was represented in paint- 
ing, in architecture, and in literature. Besides, 
they must have inferred it from man's original 
creation in the image of God ; from the trans- 
lation of Enoch, and from Jehovah's persistent 
application to Himself of the title — the God of 
Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of 



134 THE PSALTER. 

Jacob, long after those patriarchs had ceased to 
live on the earth. Nay, the very superstitions 
of the people bear witness on this point. We 
find that from the time of Moses there was con- 
stantly a class of persons who professed to be 
mediums of communication between this world 
and the other. They were called Necromancers, 
or Seekers to the dead — (Deut. xviii. n, Isaiah 
viii. 19). See the case of Saul and the witch 
of Endor. It does not make any difference 
whether we call this practice a delusion or an 
imposture. In either case, its prevalence and 
long continuance show that the popular Jewish 
mind was deeply pervaded by a conviction that 
the soul existed after this life. But since the 
vulgar held this truth without living reference 
to God, they only made it a miserable super- 
stition. But besides, there are utterances in the 
Psalms themselves which imply the conviction 
that there is a life beyond the present. In the 
Sixteenth, the sacred poet, looking death full 
in the face, said : 



Thou wilt not abandon my soul to the unseen world, 
Nor suffer Thy holy one to see the pit. 
Thou wilt show me the path of life, 
Fulness of joy in Thy presence, 
Pleasures at Thy right hand forevermore. 









THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE, ^5 

So again in the Seventeenth, contrasting 
himself with men of the world who have their 
portion in this life, who are sated with children 
to whom they bequeath their wealth, the poet 
says : 

As for me, in righteousness I shall behold Thy face, 
I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness ; 

— t\ jubilant hope which never could have been 
bounded by the grave. A similar contrast is 
found in the Forty-ninth Psalm, where the 
singer describes the vanity of men, even in their 
best estate. Although rich, and honored, and 
wise, they have no permanence. They perish 
like cattle ; they are laid in the grave ; Death 
is their shepherd ; their beauty and their glory 
are gone. But he adds, " God shall redeem 
my soul from the power of the grave, for He 
shall take me." He who knows and loves God, 
has the life of God, and can never utterly perish. 
That bond must survive even the shock of 
death. To the same effect, and partly in the 
same words, is the utterance of Asaph in the 
Seventy-third Psalm. In this striking lyric, the 
writer, after solving the painful mystery of pros- 
perous ungodliness, declares that as for himself, 
he is ever held by God's hand, and therefore 



1 36 THE PSALTER, 

has unshaken confidence. " Thou wilt guide 
me with Thy counsel, and afterward receive me 
to glory. My flesh and my heart faileth, but 
God is the strength of my heart and my portion 
forever/' Now it is true that there are other 
utterances differing very widely from these, 
such as the following : 

In death there is no remembrance of Thee, 

In the grave who shall give Thee thanks ? — (vi. 5). 

What profit is there in my blood when I go down to the pit ? 
Shall the dust praise Thee ? Shall it declare Thy truth ? — (xxx. 9) . 

Wilt Thou show wonders unto the dead ? 

Shall the shades below arise and give Thee thanks ? 

Shall Thy loving-kindness be told in the grave ? 

Or thy faithfulness in destruction? — (lxxxviii. 10, 11). 

These sorrowful forebodings were uttered un- 
der a sense of desertion. Their authors felt 
themselves going down to death under a cloud, 
and considered their situation a token of the 
Divine displeasure. Their hopeless gloom arose 
not from the mere cessation of life, but from its 
cessation under the frown of the Almighty. If 
He were alienated from them, what hope had 
they here or hereafter? Hence these wailings 
of seeming despair ! 

(3). Still it is very evident that there is a sharp 
contrast between the teachings of the Old Tes- 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE, 



137 



tament and those of the New on the subject of 
immortality. In the latter there is a fulness, and 
confidence, and glow, and splendor which leave 
nothing to be desired. In the former the state- 
ments are scanty, infrequent, and sometimes 
apparently at least ambiguous. And it is very 
certain that in the Psalter, which represents in the 
best way the practical side of dogma, there is no 
such reference to the trpth as we should expect. 
Why is this ? Why do these devout singers 
say so much less of the future life than their 
heathen contemporaries ? Why is there not 
even an allusion to the process of judgment 
upon every disembodied spirit in the Hall of 
Osiris, which their forefathers must have seen or 
heard of during their long stay in the Nile 
valley? In short, why is there the possession 
of the truth, and yet so little use of it ? The 
answer to these questions furnishes the argu- 
ment I offer in the case. The reticence of the 
Psalmists was divinely ordered. The dispensa- 
tion to which they belonged was an inchoate 
one. It was to bridge over the interval between 
the fall of man and. the fulness of time for the 
appearance of the great Revealer of God. For 
that Revealer was to make the full disclosure of 
God's purposes of love and mercy toward His 



138 



THE PSALTER. 



people. By His coming He " abolished death 
and brought life and immortality to light/' This 
was not simply the truth that death is not the 
end of man. That was known, or at least 
believed, the world over and among all races. 
But the New Testament sets forth life and im- 
mortality in the highest sense — -comprehending 
the resurrection of the body in a new and 
glorious form ; its reunion with the soul ; perfect 
freedom from all the stain and power of sin ; the 
vision of God, and the endless and ever-increas- 
ing enjoyment of His favor. Now these things 
could not be fairly conceived and satisfactorily 
applied until the actual manifestation of the Son 
of God. In His life, and death, and rising again 
from the dead, and His ascension on high, there 
was furnished the proper historical basis for an 
intelligent and satisfying faith on these points. 
And it was proper that for Him whom God 
sent last of all, it should be reserved fully to 
lift the veil of the future and disclose what the 
Lord has prepared for them that love Him. 
Hence the sparing references to these themes 
in the Psalms. The reserve was not accidental, 
but designed ; not the result of ignorance, but 
of knowledge. Had the Psalmists been left to 
themselves they would have done like the rest of 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



1 39 



mankind — joked about Charon and his boat, or 
constructed an elaborate "Ritual of the Dead," 
like the Egyptians, or adopted some form of the 
Hindu transmigration of souls, or anticipated the 
sensual paradise of Moslems, the warrior ban- 
quets of Scandinavians, or the happy hunting- 
grounds of our own Aborigines. But they did 
nothing of the kind. Their references to the 
subject are always connected with the idea of 
God. If of a hopeful character, they anticipate 
being in happy union with Him ; if of a despond- 
ing purport, the great sorrow is that the chorus 
of His praise must cease. Everything revolves 
around the one central thought of the Supreme, 
holy, and ever-blessed God, as the abiding and 
all-sufficient source of their happiness. 

Here, then, lies the peculiar, and, on natural 
principles, inexplicable position of the Psalmists. 
Having the living roots of the doctrine in their 
earlier literature, and meeting with varied forms 
of it among the heathen with whom they came 
in contact, they yet habitually and carefully re- 
frained from any prolonged or minute references 
to it. The fruitfulness and attractiveness of the 
theme is apparent in all literature ; not only in 
that of the ethnic religions, but also and eminently 
in that of Christendom,from the splendid imagery 



140 



THE PSALTER. 



of the Apocalypse, down through the hymnol- 
ogy of all ages and lands, even to our own date. 
Upon scarce any theme does the Christian poet 
rise on loftier wing, or take a wider sweep of 
imaginative conception, than when expatiating 
upon the future glories of the believer. But 
the old Psalmists stay their hands. They de- 
light to dwell on the Divine perfections or the 
glory of the Divine government. They are 
never weary of setting forth the trust and confi- 
dence and peace and joy that are found in 
fellowship with the unseen Jehovah. This is 
represented in the largest variety of phrase : — ! 
the shadow of a great [rock in a weary land, 
manna in the wilderness, gushing streams in the 
desert, the dawn of morning to a weary night- 
watcher, a shelter from the storm, a portion 
sweeter than honey, more desirable than gold. 
But as soon as they approach the life to come, 
they give but a glance within the veil, and then 
retreat to dwell upon the present spiritual 
relations of the creature and his Creator, For 
here was all that was needed. If the Almighty 
reveals Himself in condescension and love to 
His people as their God—their dwelling place, 
the rock of their strength — this involves an end- 
less relation, for surely the living God would 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



HI 



not expend His riches of love upon perishing 
creatures of clay whose houses are crushed 
before the moth. We see and feel this as a 
matter of course. And to us a mere naked im- 
mortality, such as is found among the lowest 
tribes of men, bears no comparison in dignity 
and value to the idea of a present happy life 
with God. But the marvel is, that the Hebrew 
singers understood this so distinctly, and were 
controlled by it so entirely in their most impas- 
sioned utterances. 

The case, then, stands thus : On the one side 
we find the doctrine of the soul's immortality 
holding a fixed and prominent place among the 
articles of popular belief the world over, in an- 
cient times as well as modern. This position 
has been indeed at times attacked, but never 
successfully. The evidence adduced from the 
old Sanscrit texts, or the graven or painted 
walls of Thebes or Philae, or the cuneiform in- 
scriptions of Nineveh or Persepolis, or the litera- 
ture of Greece and Rome, or the consensus of 
modern travelers, is altogether too abundant 
and clear to be resisted. The belief was so 
widespread, if not universal, as to compel us to 
attribute it to the common instincts of man's nat- 
ure. As Coleridge says, " Its fibres are to be 



142 



THE PSALTER. 



traced to the tap-root of humanity." But the 
belief was always expressed in gross and in- 
adequate forms, and associated with outlandish 
views, as if to show that our fallen nature, left 
to itself, could not frame any rational view of the 
mode of existence in the world to come, or of 
the character of its retributions. Hence men 
devised the fables of Elysium and Tartarus, the 
Metempsychosis from one fleshly form into an- 
other, the absorption into the divine unity, and 
the like. Hence, too, the folly of the Necro- 
mancy of our own day, the self-styled Spiritual- 
ism which for a generation has been rampant in 
this country. This crude imposture boasts 
much of its clear disclosure of a future life, and 
indeed has converted some materialists. But 
wherein has there been any gain to human 
knowledge or happiness or character? The 
history of the movement has only added another 
to the many illustrations already on record, of 
the moral impotence of the doctrine of immor- 
tality held in and for itself to elevate or purify. 
" The power of an endless life " (Hebrew vii. 
1 6) is something transcendent and ineffable; 
but if it be separated from its kindred thought 
of the eternal God as the moral governor of the 
world and the satisfying portion of the soul, it 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



H3 



at once degenerates into grotesque or monstrous 
or puerile conceptions, or else resolves itself in- 
to a mere prolongation of the present state of 
things without essential change, and therefore 
destitute of any restraining or uplifting influence. 
The mere continuance of being after death is 
rather a metaphysical dogma than a religious 
truth, and may coexist with the crudest and 
most unspiritual notions. The Esquimaux, the 
Papuan, the wildest savages in the forests of 
Central Africa, have no doubt that the spirits of 
their departed ancestors survive, but in no de- 
gree does this conviction raise them in the scale 
of thinking beings. 

On the other side, we find the doctrine among 
the Hebrews held indeed, and occasionally illus- 
trated in a remarkable manner, but still not 
thrust forward or made prominent, and yet all 
its essential ends gained in the fullest manner. 
The Hebrew poets talk of man's mortality in a 
strain of effectiveness and pathos nowhere sur 
passed. They represent the frailty, the vanity, 
the emptiness of human pursuits and expecta- 
tions, with a keenness which no satirist of 
Greece or Rome has exceeded. And yet their 
doctrine of man's kinship with God, of his filial 
relation, of his capacities of holiness, of his 



1 44 THE PSA L TER. 

faith in the unseen, of the superiority of spiritual 
things to temporal, of the certain overthrow of 
the transgressor and the equally certain recom- 
pense of the righteous, of the forgiveness of sin 
upon repentance and confession, and of the bless- 
edness of the new life thus secured — this doc- 
trine, I say, quite restored the scale, and put man 
in his social and religious relations in a position 
which no other ancient nation even approached. 
It is pertinent, then, again to ask, What occa- 
sioned this remarkable difference ? How comes 
it to pass that in one nation — and that not dis- 
tinguished by a philosophical spirit, nor by a 
gift for speculative inquiries — we find inwrought 
not only in its formal creed and national history, 
but also in its pious meditations and lyric songs, 
a marked and seemingly studied reticence upon 
the life beyond the grave, united with an intense- 
ly pure and spiritual conception of all divine 
things ? The only answer is, that they were 
divinely guided. This superintendence on the 
one hand kept them from the vain and foolish 
imaginations which deluded all their contempo- 
raries, and on the other refused to grant that 
degree of illumination which would have been 
inconsistent with the design and character of 
the inchoate system to which they belonged, 



THE MESSIAH AND A FUTURE LIFE. 



145 



In conclusion, let me suggest the contrasted 
relations of the two themes we have been con- 
sidering. Both refer to the Future, and yet how 
differently treated ! Of the coming Messiah 
there is abundant mention — His person, His 
offices, His suffering, His kingdom, His glory, 
His moral excellence, His world-wide influence, 
His imperishable name. The picture is so com- 
plete, so vivid, so striking, that it requires a 
vigorous imagination to find any tolerable 
analogies to it in the literatures of other ancient 
nations. Yet in regard to Immortality, the con- 
trast is the other way. Here the Hebrew sing- 
ers are reticent and obscure. Occasionally a 
rift for a moment parts the clouds, and one 
catches a glimpse of the pleasures forevermore ; 
but in an instant the curtain is drawn again, and 
it is the present relations of the soul to God 
that occupy all the attention. The ethnic re- 
ligions, on the contrary, all habitually point for- 
ward to what follows this life, making indeed 
sad work of it. For just as the old map-makers 
filled the unexplored regions of Central Africa 
with figures of unicorns and elephants and all 
sorts of mythical wild beasts, so these peopled 
the unknown beyond with monstrous imagina- 
7 



146 



THE PSALTER. 



tions which terrified, but could not attract. Now 
it is on this departure from the beaten track of 
all the world that the argument bases itself. 
Why, in that outlook upon the future which all 
thoughtful men must take — and the more when 
the soul is roused by deep experiences — why do 
the Hebrew poets say so little of one theme on 
which others are profuse and animated, and yet 
linger long and lovingly on the theme upon 
which these others have little or nothing to say? 
The reason can not be found in race or soil or 
climate or national character or institutions or 
surroundings. The only sufficient and intelli- 
gible cause is given in the fact that the sacred 
singers of Palestine were under the control of a 
superior Power, which without impairing their 
freedom, yet guided their choice of themes, and 
the way in which they treated those themes. 



LECTURE V. 

THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 



LECTURE V. 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 

A FAIR TEST — NEGATIVE EXCELLENCE— PURITY OF THE MOR- 
ALITY — FREEDOM FROM ASCETICISM, FORMALISM, HYPOC- 
RISY — LOWLY, YET JOYFUL AND FREE — NOT SELF-RIGHT- 
EOUS — THE IMPRECATIONS VINDICATED — LORD MACAULAY 
AND DR. DUFF — HISTORY OF THE PSALTER — TESTIMONIES 
TO ITS WORTH — CONCLUSION. 

K IP) Y their fruits ye shall know them/' is a 
J ) maxim of universal and absolute truth. 
It holds good in morals, in political economy, in 
statesmanship, just as much as in all natural 
processes. Good fruit the world over indi- 
cates a good tree, and evil fruit an evil tree ; 
and so in all other relations. Plans and theo- 
ries and projects may be apparently rational 
and judicious, but if on trial the results are bad, 
men almost instinctively reason back from effects 
to causes, and insist that the underlying prin- 
ciples must be unsound. But in no department 

(149) 



150 THE PSALTER. 

of human thought and action is this so manifest 
as in all that pertains to religion. If a book, 
or a doctrine, or a practice, can be shown to 
lead to immorality, that fact at once puts an 
end to dispute or doubt. In the nature of 
things, i. e., in the constitution of human so- 
ciety under the control of one supreme and in- 
finite Being, truth must be in order to good- 
ness, sound principles must lead to virtuous 
living. 

From the beginning this doctrine has been 
used in Christian Apologetics. Indeed, Gibbon, 
in his well-known enumeration of the secondary 
causes of the rapid propagation of the Gospel 
in the first centuries of our era, expressly men- 
tions the pure morals of the followers of the 
new faith as a powerful and widespread influ- 
ence in its favor, as it certainly was — and the 
more so, as this fact was shown to be the result 
of the holy precept and example of the founder 
of the system. But many, while admitting 
this claim, have tried to break its force by dis- 
paraging the elder Scriptures. They compli- 
ment the New Testament at the expense of the 
Old. No judicious defender of the faith will ac- 
cept such compliments. Not only the nature of 
the case, but the painful results of experience 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 151 

during the last century, show that both Testa- 
ments constitute integral and constituent parts 
of one book, nor can they be separated without 
violence and harm. The Hebrew Scriptures 
are to the Greek what the foundation is to a 
house ; and to cut them off is to leave Chris- 
tianity like an exquisitely-shaped and propor- 
tioned pyramid floating in the air. He who 
surrenders Moses and the Prophets must, in 
logical consistency/ surrender Christ and the 
Apostles in like manner. Of course the two 
portions of the book are not identical — if they 
were, why should there be two ? They have 
differences, but these differences spring out of 
the fact that the revelation is a gradual one, of 
which the earlier portions point to the later, 
while the later presuppose the earlier. There 
will, therefore, naturally be in the concluding 
part a fulness and maturity not to be expected 
in what goes before. Yet, substantially the 
doctrinal and moral teaching will be the same. 

Is this the fact? To answer this question 
out of the Psalter is the aim of the present Lec- 
ture. Here one has the advantage of seeing 
the matter in the fairest light. For lyric poems 
are expressions of experience — songs of the 
heart They contain views of truth and duty, 



1 52 THE PSALTER. 

not arranged and tabulated as in a code or 
treatise, but actually felt and uttered under the 
varying circumstances of outward providence 
or inward struggles. The singer looks out 
upon God, or the external world, or his fellows, 
or inwardly upon his own past or present ; and 
then his soul is stirred within him, his heart 
boils over, and he bursts into song. Such ut- 
terances must be sincere. They are wrung 
out of a great pressure from within, and they 
bear the stamp of their origin. They register 
the moral status of the poet with unfailing 
accuracy. In looking at this status, the first 
impression concerns its negative character. 
One finds a total absence of the coarseness, 
frivolity, or downright immorality so offensively 
prominent in the hymns to the gods preserved 
in some other religions. The whole atmos- 
phere is one of seriousness and purity. There 
are no tales of mischievous adventure, of cun- 
ning tricks, or of sensual indulgences as in 
the Homeric Hymns ; nor is there any iden- 
tifying of God and Nature as one and the 
same, whether in the attractive or the terri- 
ble manifestations of physical phenomena, nor 
a habitual supplication for mere outward gifts, 
such as health, children, fertile pastures, boun- 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 



153 



teous harvests, victory over foes, which con- 
stitute the staple of the prayers in the Rig- Veda. 
One will look in vain through the entire Psal- 
ter for any compromise of morality, any deifica- 
tion of natural powers, any representation or 
suggestion of true happiness as possible or de- 
sirable apart from the knowledge and service 
of a holy God. It is an entirely safe book to 
put into the hands of the young, the inexpe- 
rienced, or the ignorant. They can learn noth- 
ing which they will need to unlearn, nothing to 
weaken the moral forces of the soul, or give an 
unhealthy direction to the imagination. 

But to say this is to say little in comparison 
with the truth. The Psalter not only does not 
impair the principles of morals, but in every 
way confirms and establishes them. It makes 
for righteousness throughout. The key-note 
is given in the first Psalm, often considered a 
sort of preface to the whole. The theme is the 
Happy Man. Who is he ? Where is he to be 
found? How is he to be described? Is he 
known or made by the possession of wealth, or 
place, or learning, or power, or any other form 
of worldly good ? Nay. He is the one who 
walks not in the way of the ungodly, nor stands 



7* 



154 



THE PSALTER, 



in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the 
scornful ; but his delight is in the law of the 
Lord, and in that law he meditates day and 
night. Such a man is like a tree planted be- 
side living streams whose fruit does not fail, 
neither does its leaf wither ; whereas a wicked 
man is like the dry and worthless chaff which 
the wind drives away. 

Here is suggested what is one of the most 
marked and discriminating features of the He- 
brew Ethics, viz., that they are deeply rooted 
in religion. In all false religions, ancient and 
modern, and in some corrupt forms of Christi- 
anity, the two things are widely separated. A 
man may be moral without being religious, and 
vice versa. Religion is a set of tenets and 
ritual practices which may be carefully observed 
and yet leave the outward secular life wholly 
unaffected. Morality, on the other hand, is the 
discharge of social duties without respect to 
divine authority, or the sanctions of Providence. 
The Psalter knows nothing of this most mis- 
chievous divorce between integrity of life and 
the eternal, spiritual truth upon which all up- 
rightness must rest. It uniformly represents 
God as governor and ruler — the source, the 
standard, and the efficacious cause of all moral 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS, 



155 



good. Justice, temperance, truth, meekness, 
and love have indeed intrinsic value ; but they 
press upon the heart and conscience of these 
singers, because they are part of the express 
will of God. The servant of Jehovah, as such, 
must have and exercise these qualities. See 
this finely set forth in a Psalm (xv.) usually 
thought to have been composed on occasion of 
the removal of the Ark to Zien : 

Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle ? 
Who shall dwell in Thy holy hill ? 

The answer is not, IJe that is circumcised, 
that comes to the great yearly festivals, that 
shuns unclean food, or anything of the kind, but 

He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, 

And speaketh truth in his heart : 

Who backbiteth not with his tongue, 

Nor doeth evil to his neighbor, 

Nor taketh up a reproach against his friend ; 

In whose eyes a vile person is contemned, 

But he honoreth them that fear the Lord ; 

Who sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not 

He that doeth these things shall never be moved. 

Is there anywhere a brighter picture of stain- 
less honor, of lofty integrity ? — yet the whole 
inseparably linked with the presence and favor 
of God as its origin and sanction. 



156 THE PSALTER. 

Yet with this elevated standard of ethical 
principle there is nothing overstrained or exag- 
gerated. There is not the least tinge of ascet- 
icism ; no punishing of the body for the sins of 
the soul ; no denial of the sweet charities of 
domestic life ; no rejection of civil or political re- 
lations as inherently sinful or unbecoming ; no 
praise of celibacy, or solitude, or any other 
form of voluntary renunciation of what is in it- 
self innocent — nothing whatever in common 
with self-torturing Brahmans, or Jewish Essenes, 
or scornful Stoics, or even Christian stylites or 
anchorets. On the contrary, there are domes- 
tic, household, social, and patriotic Psalms. 
These compare brotherly affection to the dews 
of Hermon, or the fragrant oil of the sanctu- 
ary ; God's continual providence to favors sent 
in sleep ; children at one time to the olive plants 
around the table, at another to arrows which 
fill the quiver of a hero ; while the daughters are 
corner-pillars polished after the similitude of a 
palace. 

The Psalmists praise God as the Father of 
the fatherless, the Judge of the widow, who sets 
the solitary in families, and makes the barren 
woman the joyful mother of children. They 
exult in Jerusalem as the city of God, the 







THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 



157 



mountain of His holiness, the place where His 
honor dwelleth, and invoke peace within her 
walls and prosperity within her palaces. And 
of Mount Zion they declare that it is beautiful 
for situation, the joy of the whole earth, a place 
more excellent and glorious than all the moun- 
tains of prey ; God Himself establishes it for- 
ever. The whole tone here is peaceful, domes- 
tic, and national in the best sense. The moral- 
ity is not that of slaves, or of hermits, or of 
philosophers, or of devotees, but of men, wom- 
en, and children, engaged in all the usual re- 
lations of human life, but elevating and trans- 
figuring these by a constant sense of their com- 
mon obligation as children of the heavenly 
King, as subjects of a holy and beneficent law. 
The purity of the Hebrew ethics is the more 
remarkable when one considers the minute and 
complicated ritual of worship in which all the 
authors of the Psalms were trained. The whole 
round of sacred persons and places and times 
was prescribed according to the pattern shown to 
Moses on the mount. The custom of sacrifices 
or offerings, bloody or unbloody, found in all 
the ancient nations, was here developed with 
amazing fulness. Every day the morning and 
the evening sacrifice was kindled. On the week- 



158 THE PSALTER. 

ly, monthly, yearly festivals, besides innumerable 
occasions of a private or personal nature, the 
blood of bulls and goats ran, the smoke of incense 
ascended, the steam of burning flesh filled the 
courts of the tabernacle. The cultus was 
stately and imposing in the highest degree. 
Nothing, therefore, was more natural than for 
the worshippers to fall into what in modern 
times is called the opus operatum theory, and 
to attribute an intrinsic and inherent efficacy to 
the gorgeous ceremonial in which they were 
habitually engaged. This was a common error 
among the heathen. They supposed, or at 
least are represented by the poets as suppos- 
ing, that hecatombs of victims and costly liba- 
tions brought their divinities under obligation to 
them, so that it would be ungrateful and wrong 
not to show favor to such earnest and self-sac- 
rificing worshippers. Nor is there any reason 
to doubt that a similar degrading notion at 
times obtained among the Hebrews. But it 
never found expression among the Psalmists. 
Again and again do they repudiate it, especially 
in the great judicial process described in the 
Fiftieth Psalm. Here Jehovah, revealing Him- 
self in fire and tempest as at Sinai, summons the 
people before Him, and in lofty irony reproves 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 



159 



the stupidity which would deem mere outward 
oblations any gratification to Him. 

I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices, 

Or for thy burnt-offerings continually before Me. 

I will take no bullock out of thy house, 

Nor he-goats from thy folds. 

For every beast of the forest is Mine, 

And the cattle upon a thousand hills. 

I know all the fowls of the mountains, 

And whatever moveth in the fields is with Me. 

If I were hungry I would not tell thee, 

For the world is Mine, and the fulness thereof. 

Will I eat the flesh of bulls, 

Or drink the blood of goats ? 

Do I need such things, or is it possible for Me 
to use them ? Yet it is to be observed that in 
avoiding one error the writer does not run into 
the opposite. Because sacrifices have no in- 
trinsic merit and can not feed the Deity, it does 
not follow that they are useless. On the con- 
trary, they were both needed and commanded. 
Hence soon after the vigorous expostulation 
just recited, follows the precept — 

Sacrifice to God thanksgiving, 

And so pay thy vows to the Most High. 

The animal victims were still to be offered, but 
as symbolical expressions of penitence, faith, 
and devout affection. Presented in this way 



l6o THE PSALTER. 

they fulfilled their function, and the believer 
would find his worship accepted and blessed. 

In the latter part of the same Psalm we have 
a similar testimony against another error com- 
mon among the professors of every faith. This 
is hypocrisy, the substitution of words for 
deeds, the homage which vice pays to virtue. 

Unto the wicked God saith, 

What hast thou to do to declare My statutes 

And take My covenant into thy mouth ? 

Whereas thou hatest instruction, 

And hast cast My words behind thee. 

And then He proceeds to specify violations of 
three of the commandments, concluding with 
the solemn words, — 

These things hast thou done 

And I kept silence ; 

Thou thoughtest I was just like thyself. 

I will reprove thee, 

And array (thy sins) before thine eyes. 

The uniform doctrine of the Psalter is that 
God requires truth in the inward parts. Men 
may forget His character and attempt to im- 
pose upon Him by sounding professions, but 
the effort is vain. The mask will be stripped 
off from every hypocrite, and all secret iniquities 
be brought to light. They who would walk so 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 161 

as to please God must have clean hands and a 
pure heart. Otherwise they only flatter them- 
selves in their own eyes until their iniquity is 
found to be hateful. 

It is often supposed that the law w T as re- 
garded by the Old Testament believers as a 
yoke of bondage which they submitted to as a 
disagreeable necessity, slavishly fearing its pun- 
ishment and selfishly looking forward to its re- 
ward. The holy singers teach us better things. 
They indeed were deeply conscious of their 
feebleness and dependence. Hear the cry of 
the 19th Psalm: 

Who can discern his errors ? 

Clear Thou me from hidden faults. 

Keep back Thy servant also from presumptuous sins ; 

Let them not have dominion over me. 

Then shall I be perfect, 

And I shall be clean from much transgression. 

To the same effect is the long alphabetical 1 19th 
Psalm, which a recent German critic charges 
with monotony and poverty of thought, but in 
so doing only shows his own poverty of spirit- 
ual apprehension. In every age this singular 
lyric has been a chosen portion of Scripture to 
the spiritually-minded. Never wearied by its 
repetitions, or its apparent redundancies, they 



\§2 , THE PSALTER. k 

have found in each verse a new stimulus to 
pious meditation or fresh nutriment of devout 
feeling. The Psalm is a continued series of 
aphorisms expressing in every variety of phrase, 
on one hand the excellence of the divine law, 
and on the other the "difficulty and yet the 
blessedness of conforming to it. Hence it is 
full of devout and earnest breathings after Je- 
hovah's grace and help. 

Oh that my ways were directed to keep Thy statutes. . 

My soul cleaveth to the dust ; 

Quicken Thou me according to Thy word. 

Hold Thou me up, and I shall be safe. 

Order my footsteps in Thy word, 

And let not any iniquity have dominion over me. 

The deep insight of these holy men into the 
radical corruption of human nature made them 
thoroughly sensible of the fact that good 
thoughts and good works have their source 
only in God. Yet while all this is true ; while 
they, like the Apostle, found a law that when 
they would do good, evil was present with them, 
they also could and did say with the same Apos- 
tle, " I delight in the law of God after the in- 
ward man." Indeed we have an almost identi- 
cal utterance in the 40th Psalm : 



THE ETHICS GF THE PSALMS. T63 

To do Thy will, my God, I delight, \ 

Yea, Thy law is within my heart. 

That law to them was a badge, not of slavery, 
but of liberty. It gave light to the mind, it 
quickened the soul, it rejoiced the heart. The 
statutes of the Lord were more to be desired 
than gold, yea, than much fine gold, sweeter 
also than honey and the droppings of the comb. 

Oh, how I love Thy law ! 

It is my meditation all the day. 

Seven times a day do I praise Thee, 
Because of Thy righteous judgments. 

It is not necessary to affirm that these utter- 
ances express the feelings of all the people, or 
even the habitual state of those from whose lips 
they fell. It is enough if they are regarded as 
the product of some favored hours of devotion, 
for even then they stand as the norm of godly 
character, the standard which every one is to set 
before him. And they show what a moral ele- 
vation was reached by obscure singers in an 
obscure country, far, far away from the aesthetic 
completeness of Greece, yet kindling a fire of 
love to God and holy things at which every 
succeeding generation has been glad to light 
its torch. 



164 THE PSALTER. 

But there are two objections to the ethical 
correctness of the Psalter which require notice. 
One of these rests upon the assertion not un- 
frequently made by the Psalmist of his integ- 
rity. I will quote one case as strong as any, 
that which is found in Psalm xviii. 20-24 : 

The Lord rewarded me according to my righteouness ; 

According to the cleanness of my hands hath He recompensed 
me. 

For I have kept the ways of the Lord, 

And have not wickedly departed from my God. 

I was also upright before Him, 

And kept myself from my iniquity. 

Therefore the Lord recompensed me according to my righteous- 
ness, 

According to the cleanness of my hands in His sight. 

Such utterances are charged as breathing the 
very spirit of self-righteousness and irreligious 
pride, and as, therefore, wholly unworthy of 
sincere and candid persons, much more of the 
devout and God-fearing. But this is a great 
mistake. In all these passages the worshipper 
is not laying claim to a perfect holiness, for one 
and all agree in the petition (cxliii. 2), — 

Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, 
For in Thy sight no man living is righteous. 

The consciousness of human guilt lay too deep 
for that. The explanation of the claim to right- 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 165 

eousness is not found (as Hengstenberg holds) 
in the fact of an upright moral striving, a sin- 
cere bent of mind earnestly reaching after the 
fulfilment of the divine law, in view of which 
God may be expected to pardon many weak- 
nesses. How such a view is to be reconciled 
with the doctrine of gratuitous justification I can 
not conceive. Far better is the ground that 
the Psalmist is speaking of the case as it stood 
between him and his enemies, and in that view 
meant his words to be taken in their literal 
sense. Consider, e.g. y his conflict with Saul. 
In this the right was all on one side. Toward 
the king, David's whole course was absolutely 
faultless. Hunted for his life, and persecuted 
in every possible way, he refused to retaliate 
even when it was in his power. He could, 
therefore, justly claim as against such opposers 
absolute rectitude. Such a protestation is quite 
consistent with a deep sense of sin before God. 
Thus Paul asserted that in his flesh there dwelt 
no good thing, and spoke of himself as the 
chief of sinners ; yet when occasion required, he 
resolutely asserted his integrity, and made a 
long detail of his services and his sufferings (2 
Corinthians xi. 21-31). And God is not dis- 
pleased with even a heat of jealousy in His 



1 66 THE PSALTER. 

people when insisting upon their sincerity. And 
such declarations are useful to remind us of the 
necessity of being able, in the quarrel of the 
world with the Lord's people, evermore to in- 
sist that as to the things in which they assail 
us we are not assailable. It is not simply by 
passing feelings and vain imaginations that 
God's children are separated from others, but 
by a consistent outward life. 

Another and far more formidable objection 
to the ethical excellence of the Psalms is based 
on the fearful imprecations which some of them 
contain. Among the most striking are the fol- 
lowing : 

Let them be confounded that seek after my soul ; 

Let them be turned back and brought to confusion that devise my 

hurt, 
Let them be as chaff before the wind, 
And let the angel of the Lord drive them. 
Let their way be dark and slippery, 
And let the angel of the Lord persecute them. — (xxxv. 4, 5, 6.) 

Pour out Thy indignation upon them, 

And let Thy wrathful anger take hold on them. 

Add iniquity unto their iniquity, 

And let them not come into Thy righteousness. — (lxix. 24, 27.) 

Set Thou a wicked man over him, 
And let Satan stand at his right hand. 
When he is judged, let him be condemned ; 
And let his prayer become sin. 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. \§j 

Let his children be fatherless, 

And his wife a widow. — (cix. 6, 7, 9.) 

O, daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed ; 

Happy shall he be that rendereth unto Thee 

The deed which thou hast done to us. 

Happy shall he be that taketh 

And dasheth thy little ones against the rock. — (cxxxvii. 8, 9.) 

Such terrible maledictions have often been a 
grief and perplexity to the Christian, and an 
occasion for cavil and scoffing to the sceptical. 
And although one can not go so far as to say 
with Mr. Froude, " Those who accept the 109th 
Psalm as the Word of God are far on their 
way toward auto-da-fes and massacres of St. 
Bartholomew/' or to agree with Dean Stanley, 
who describes their spirit as " savage " {Jewish 
Church, II., 170) ; yet it must be confessed that 
at first at least there seems to be a sharp contrast 
to the mild and benignant tones of the New Tes- 
tament. This has led some with Bishops Home 
and Horsley to try to overcome the difficulty 
by rendering the verbs in the future tense, and 
so converting the imprecations into predictions. 
But I believe that this is now considered by all 
respectable scholars a mere evasion, and one 
that does violence to the settled laws of the 
Hebrew language. Besides, it leaves unex- 
plained a numerous class of passages to which 



l68 THE PSALTER. 

even its advocates admit that it does not apply. 
A similar evasion is that suggested by Arnold 
of Rugby, that the language of these Psalms 
may be, and is to be, applied by the modern 
reader to the enemies of his soul's peace. 
But even were this possible, still it would not 
explain these fearful words as pronounced by 
the original utterers. Not a few, therefore, have 
taken the ground that the language is indefensi- 
ble ; that it sprang from the presence of wicked 
passion in the hearts of God's ancient servants, 
who could not rise above the level of the dis- 
pensation in which they lived ; and that we 
ought not to be surprised at their occassional 
lapses into human infirmity. This view is re- 
garded by Dr. Hesse (Bampton Lecture, 1872) 
as that which is least objectionable. Even 
Tholuck seems to admit that at times there 
mingled with the holy fire of the Psalmists the 
unholy fire of personal irritation. This is 
wholly inadmissible. These Psalms were not 
random individual utterances, for which the 
Bible is no more responsible than it is for the 
speeches in the Book of Job, but they were 
from the first destined for use in the sanctuary. 
God, therefore, must be considered as suggest- 
ing and approving the prayers which His Church 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 



169 



was to offer in the perpetual service of song. 
The human authors doubtless expressed their 
own feelings, but they also expressed what the 
community of God's people ought to feel, and 
did feel. On any other view it would be diffi- 
cult, if not impossible, to maintain the inspira- 
tion and authority of the Psalter. 

The gist of the matter lies in the question, 
Do these Psalms contain the malignant expres- 
sion of ill-will to personal enemies as such, or 
are they rather the utterance of God's punitive 
wrath against His obstinate foes ? Surely it is 
not difficult to maintain the latter. The as- 
sumption that the Old Testament cherished a 
vindictive spirit and tolerated resentment for 
private injuries, is wholly unfounded. In the 
Pentateuch itself we read, " If thou .meet thine 
enemy's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt 
surely bring it back to him" (Exodus xxiii. 4). 
M Thou shalt not avenge nor bear any grudge 
against the children of the people, but shall 
love thy neighbor as thyself " (Leviticus xix. 
18). So in Job, " If I rejoice in the destruc- 
tion of him that hated me, or lifted up myself 
when evil found him ; neither have I suffered 
my mouth to sin by wishing a curse upon his 
8 



170 



THE PSALTER. 



soul " (xxxi. 29, 30). The prescription of the 
law (Exodus xxi. 23), " Life for life, eye for 
eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand," etc., has 
been ignorantly quoted as if it laid down the 
rule for individuals in redressing their own 
wrongs, whereas it simply states the penalty 
which the magistrates are to exact from a wrong- 
doer. Indeed, so far from the Old Testament 
being at war with the New on this point, we 
find the Apostle, in dissuading his Roman 
brethren from taking matters into their own 
hands, going back to the book of Deuterono- 
my and quoting its words as a rule, "Dearly 
beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give 
place unto wrath ; for it is written, ' Vengeance 
is Mine, I will repay/ saith the Lord." And 
that these inculcations were not fruitless is 
shown by many examples, and especially that 
of David. He was a man of intense force of 
will, and of very strong passions, yet he often 
exhibited great meekness and forbearance even 
in trying circumstances. His conduct toward 
Saul from first to last indicated a spirit anything 
but malignant and revengeful ; and the same is 
true of his deportment under Shimei's bitter re- 
proaches. Nor can his dying charge to Solomon, 
respecting Joab and Shimei, be said, if all the 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 



171 



circumstances are considered, to be a case of 
hate projecting- itself beyond the grave, but 
rather of wisdom securing at a future time that 
satisfaction of justice which could not be at- 
tained in the present. This statement is sus- 
tained by his own words. In Psalm 7th, 4, 5, 
he invokes wrath upon his head if he has re- 
warded evil to one that was at peace with him, 
and affirms on the contrary that he had deliv- 
ered the man that was without cause his enemy. 
So in the very Psalm which contains some sore 
imprecations, the 35th, we find that David refers 
to personal foes in a very different manner, — 

They rewarded me evil for good, 

My soul was bereaved. 

But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth ; 

I afflicted my soul with fasting, 

And my prayer returned into my own bosom. 

I behaved myself as if it had been my friend, my brother ; 

I bowed down heavily as one that mourneth for a mother. 

It seems to be evident, then, that when David 
poured out his awful maledictions, it was not from 
a mean and base desire to see his personal ene- 
mies laid low. So far as he, himself, was con- 
cerned, he could afford to forgive and forget. 
But his enemies were also enemies of the Lord, 
and he could rightfully desire and rejoice in 



172 



THE PSALTER. 



their destruction when that dread result was 
necessary to vindicate God's justice, and demon- 
strate the reality and power of His government. 
Thus, in Psalm 58th, the singer, after denounc- 
ing unjust and oppressive rulers, and supplicat- 
ing their rapid and hopeless overthrow, con- 
cludes : 

The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance, 
He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. 
So that men shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous, 
Verily there is a God that judgeth in the earth. 



It is God's honor that is chiefly concerned, 
and not the personal feelings of any of His serv- 
ants. There is, therefore, no more individual 
resentment in these utterances than there is in 
the tremendous imprecation of Paul, which, 
though so simple in its words, contains a full 
equivalent to all the long and varied wishes for 
vengeance contained in all the imprecatory 
Psalms put together. " If any man love not 
our Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema, 
Maranatha." Surely in this fearful expression 
the Apostle was gratifying no private grudge, 
but only exhibiting his intense and perfect sym- 
pathy with the merit and the claims of our ador- 
able Redeemer. 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 



173 



But admitting this, why were these awful 
curses put into the Liturgy of the Church, 
and so stereotyped for all coming generations ? 
For good reason. It is true the rule of our 
conduct is to bless and curse not, to pray for 
them that despitefully use us ; and no part of 
our Lord's example is more binding upon us 
than His rebuke to James and John for wishing 
to call down fire from heaven upon the churlish 
Samaritans, and His own prayer for His mur- 
derers upon the cross. But there is danger 
lest this meekness and forbearance should be 
misapplied so as to check or lessen that living 
conviction of the evil of sin, and of the cer- 
tainty of God's retributive righteousness, which 
is essential to true Christian character. The 
Apostle tells us that the civil magistrate is "a 
revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth 
evil " — not simply to preserve order and to de- 
ter by example others from wrong-doing, but 
in the name of God, whose representative and 
minister he is, to redress the wrongs of out- 
raged justice. This is seen whenever some 
foul crime has been committed. Meek and 
gentle souls who scarcely know what malice is 
by experience, and who would be quite ready to 
feed and clothe a personal enemy, will feel a 



174 



THE PSALTER. 



righteous indignation, and long and pray that 
the criminal may be detected and receive the 
just reward of his crimes. Now it is just the 
same sympathy, not with human government, 
but the divine, that is expressed in the impre- 
catory Psalms. The kingdom of God comes 
not only by showing mercy to the penitent, but 
by executing judgment upon the impenitent. 
Was it not so at the deluge, at the deliverance 
from Egypt, at the destruction of Jerusalem ? 
We need to have the consuming zeal for God 
which animated the old Hebrew singers, and 
then their solemn utterances will take their right- 
ful place as just and true. They will seem as 
natural and proper as the opening words of 
Milton's fine sonnet on the Vaudois, — 

Avenge, O Lord ! thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold. 

The truth is, these Psalms denounce no more 
against the wicked than what God actually 
brings upon them. They simply utter the bur- 
den of the Lord concerning His obdurate foes. 
Is it impossible that a godly mind may become 
so much at one with the divine mind in these 
respects, as justly to pray that the Divine Being 
would do what it would be certainly righteous 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 



175 



in Him to do, and what in His time He assuredly 
will do ? In fact, the argument against these 
imprecations is really an argument against all 
retributions, and therefore against the moral 
government of God, against that throne with 
whose stability the welfare of the universe is 
identified. Forbearance toward the desperately 
wicked is injustice and cruelty to the unoffend- 
ing, and the feeling which demands justice, in- 
stead of being malignant, is really benevolent. 
As long as men are at ease, reposing amid 
the comforts of an established Christian society, 
and breathing an atmosphere of contentment, 
peace, and moral order, they fail to hear or un- 
derstand the outcry of God's suffering children, 
and have little sympathy with a righteous indig- 
nation at wrong-doing. But let storm and tem- 
pest come, let diabolical iniquity be wrought, 
let not only law and justice, but humanity and 
nature be trodden under foot, and at once there 
is a startling recoil of the soul. Even the meek 
and patient fall back upon these inspired utter- 
ances, and cry out with fervor : 

O Lord God ! to whom vengeance belongeth ; 

O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show Thyself. 

Lift up Thyself, Thou Judge of the earth, 

Render a reward to the proud. 



1 76 THE PSAL TER. 

Lord, how long shall the wicked, 

How long shall the wicked triumph ? — (xciv. 1-3). 

An irrepressible instinct of human nature 
planted by the author of that nature unites with 
the sentiments nourished by the revelation of 
God's essential and unalterable righteousness in 
His word to make men long and pray that the 
doers of evil may be rooted out of the earth. 

A signal illustration of this truth is found in 
what took place at the time of the East Indian 
mutiny in 1857, when the news of the fearful 
atrocities perpetrated not only upon men in 
arms, but upon women and children, reached 
Europe and America. The first feeling was one 
of unspeakable horror ; then went up from both 
sides of the Atlantic a terrible cry for revenge. 
Persons who had no tie of blood or affection or 
interest with the sufferers, felt the emotion just 
as much as the nearest relatives. A prominent 
American author, Dr. O. W. Holmes, wrote 
the suggestion that England should take down 
the map of India, and correct it thus : Delhi, 
dele, and declared that the civilized world would 
say, Amen. Lord Macaulay (Life, II., 367-9) 
said, " It is painful to be so revengeful as I feel 
myself. I, who can not bear to see a beast or a 
bird in pain, could look on without winking 



THE E THICS OF THE PSALMS. 



177 



while Nana Sahib underwent all the tortures of 
Ravaillac." Again, "Till this year I did not 
know what real vindictive hatred meant. With 
what horror I used to read in Livy how Fulvius 
put to death the whole Capuan Senate in the 
Second Punic War ! And with what equanimity 
I could hear that the whole garrison of Delhi 
and all the rabble of the bazaar had been treat- 
ed in the same way! Is this wrong? Is not 
the severity which springs from a great sensi- 
bility to human suffering, a better thing than 
the lenity which springs from indifference to 
human suffering? " Still more marked was the 
utterance of the great man who stands at the 
head of living missionaries of the cross, Dr. 
Alexander Duff, of Scotland. He said, " I 
could never fully understand how the so-called 
imprecatory Psalms could be consistent with the 
teachings of the New Testament, until the Se- 
poy rebellion broke out with such terrific fury, 
and foes sprung up filling the land with violence, 
shaking the foundations of society and of gov- 
ernment ; threatening towns and cities with pil- 
lage, fire, and sword ; murdering the innocent 
and defenceless ; persecuting unoffending Chris- 
tians with especial malignity ; making unresist- 
8* 



i 7 8 



THE PSALTER. 



ing missionaries a sacrifice to brutal lust and 
deadly torture, and thus rolling back the tide 
of Christian civilization, that iniquity might come 
in again like a flood, and heathenism with all its 
horrors and idolatry once more set up its seats 
in the land — not until then could it be properly 
realized — felt — that there are times in the out- 
breaking of human passion and human enmity 
when the pleadings of mercy are vain, and jus- 
tice, naked, pitiless justice, must draw the sword 
in a war of righteous self-defence. " 

On this view of the case, the Psalms in ques- 
tion are not to be apologized for, nor explained 
away, nor renounced, but to be justified and 
commended as an integral part of the word of 
God, as fulfilling an important and necessary 
function, as suggesting in a most striking and 
appropriate way that sympathy with God's gov- 
ernment, and that jealousy for God's honor which 
are the strongest moral powers of the soul. 
They teach us the fundamental difference be- 
tween the popular notion of goodness as identi- 
cal with careless, good-natured indulgence, and 
the Scriptural doctrine of holiness. God, we 
are told, hates sin, and He directs us to abhor 
that which is evil ; which indeed seems a logical 
necessity. For a good man must love that 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 



179 



which is good ; and how can he love the good 
without hating its opposite ? Hence the two 
are united in one of the prophetic statements 
of the moral ground of our Lord's exaltation : 
"Thou hast loved righteousness and hated in- 
iquity/' The truest test of religious character 
is found in the degree of our sympathy with 
God in His aversion as well as in His compla- 
cency. Indeed, a deep sense of moral evil is 
essential to a true or saving knowledge of 
God. Hence the value of those portions of 
holy writ which stimulate and intensify this con- 
viction, The intelligent reader of these Psalms 
will never fall a prey to the dreamy sentimental- 
ism which enfeebles so much of the piety of our 
times, or to the rationalistic subtleties which 
convert sin into a misfortune, or an accident, or 
a means of good. He will never exalt mercy at 
the expense of righteousness, and so turn it into 
feebleness and incapacity. On the contrary, 
with a healthy moral sense, and in the spirit of 
power, of love, and of a sound mind, he will be 
able to adopt the words which close the 139th 
Psalm, the crown of the collection, the noble 
lyric which has attracted the praise of all lands 
and all scholars : 



I go THE PSAL TER. 

Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee ? 

And am not I grieved with those that rise up against Thee ? 

I hate them with perfect hatred. 

I count them mine enemies. 

Search me, O God, and know my heart ; 

Try me and know my thoughts ; 

And see if there be any wicked way in me, 

And lead me in the way everlasting. 

To conclude : I have now gone over the lead- 
ing points of the argument, and stated the 
teaching of the Psalms upon the nature of God 
and of man — the two great factors in any scheme 
of religious thought ; upon the contrasted topics 
of the Messiah and of immortality — one remark- 
able for the fulness of its treatment, the other 
for its scantiness and obscurity ; and finally, 
upon the essential features of ethics and wor- 
ship. In all these respects it has been shown 
that there is in the Psalter a purity, a correct- 
ness, and a spiritual elevation which stamp it as 
wholly unique among all the literature of its 
own or any preceding age. And this fact, taken 
in connection with the character of the book, as 
not only poetical, but lyrical, and with the cir- 
cumstances of the region, people, and period in 
which the collection originated, compel the be- 
lief that the sweet singers of Israel sang not 
only under poetic, but divine inspiration, and 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. i8l 

that their work is part of an authentic and bind- 
ing revelation from the living God. This con- 
clusion is greatly strengthened by the subse- 
quent history of the Psalter. For twenty-five 
centuries its varied contents have maintained a 
continuous historic life, unbroken by neglect or 
oblivion — and that, too, among the most widely 
differing races and countries. They never could 
be buried under the rubbish of an obsolete 
literature like the Vedas and the Avestan, nor 
hid away in the impenetrable darkness of an 
unknown language like the cuneiform inscrip- 
tions. Their very nature gave them an inex- 
haustible vitality. The ecclesiastical common- 
wealth, in which they were produced, passed 
through as many dangers and disasters from 
without and from within as any of its contem- 
poraries, and at last went down in a tremendous 
catastrophe. But the Psalms survived, and 
ever since have been flourishing in immortal 
youth. The reason is, that they are true. Quite 
beyond their excellence as poetry, their beauty 
or finish, or pathos, or lyric fire, they are the 
living, breathing record of an experience which 
enters into that which is most characteristic, 
permanent, and universal in Man, his moral in- 
stincts and his spiritual- relations to his Maker. 



1 82 THE PSALTER. 






"The deeps of our humanity remain unruffled 
by the storms of ages which change the sur- 
face/' It is these deeps to which the Psalms 
relate. Local and national as they are, they do 
not treat life after the fashion of any one age 
or race, but life in its essential and unchangeable 
elements, and that so thoroughly that every 
possible state of feeling is represented, and 
every condition of humanity provided for. As 
Hooker says, " Let there be any grief or dis- 
ease incident to the soul of man, any wound or 
sickness, named, for which there is not in this 
treasure-house a present comfortable remedy at 
all times to be found/' Each of these divine 
lyrics is beyond question the true expression of 
an individual human heart pouring itself out 
before God, according to its situation at the time ; 
but all observation shows that the writers ex- 
pressed the joys and sorrows, the struggles and 
the victories, the fears and the aspirations, not 
of one man, but of all. Hence the unanimity 
with which they have been accepted in every 
age as the inspired directory for worship, both 
public and private — not simply recognized in 
form as such, but actually used for every con- 
ceivable utterance of prayer and praise. The 
language of Dean Church is not more express- 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. ^3 

ive than it is true, when, comparing the remains 
of early heathen religions with the Psalms, he 
says, " They are like the appearance of the 
illuminated, but dead surface of the moon, with 
its burnt-out and extinct volcanoes, contrasted 
with the abounding light and splendor of the 
unexhausted sun, still, age after age, the source 
of life and warmth, and joy to the world, still 
waking up new energies and developing new 
wonders/' How many in the long track of the 
ages have had their devotion kindled, their hearts 
comforted, their affections moulded by this 
blessed book ! To the Jews, alike at the vic- 
tories under such kings as Jehoshaphat and 
Hezekiah, or in the bitterness of exile, or in the 
nascent hopes of the Restoration, the Psalter 
was the recognized vehicle of thanks or suppli- 
cation. The Maccabees, in their little-known^ 
but most wondrous struggle, drew their inspira- 
tion from the same source. A Psalm brightened 
the gloom at the last supper of our Lord. And 
He himself when on the cross expressed His 
fearful isolation in the words of one Psalm, and 
in those of another gave up his spirit unto God. 
When Paul and Silas lay in the prison at Phil- 
ippi, with feet fast in the stocks, they astonished 
the other prisoners with the songs of Zion. 



!84 THE PSALTER. 

These examples were followed by the early- 
Church. " Go where you will," says Jerome, 
" the ploughman at his plough sings his joyful 
Hallelujahs, the busy mower regales himself 
with his Psalms, and the vine-dresser is singing 
one of the songs of David. These are the 
solace of the shepherd in his solitude and of the 
husbandman in his toil." According to Euse- 
bius, the martyrs in the Thebaid employed their 
latest breath in uttering these divine compo- 
sitions, just as was done centuries afterward by 
John Huss and Jerome of Prague, when burning 
at the stake.* So the army of Gustavus Adol- 
phus, and the Protestants at Courtras, and the 
Ironsides of Cromwell, and the Covenanters of 



* In 1663, the town of Kingston, N. Y., was attacked by the 
Indians, who bin ned all the houses and carried off a number of 
prisoners. These were taken far into the wilderness near the 
Shawangunk river, where preparations were made to torture 
them to death. The women of the party, to support their 
drooping spirits, began to sing the songs of Zion. The music 
attracted the attention of their captors and delayed their pro- 
ceedings, discovering which, the singers raised Dathenus's ver- 
sion of the 137th Psalm, and poured out its melancholy strains 
in sight of the spot where the faggots were piled for their torture. 
Just then deliverance came, the Indians fled, and the songs of 
mourning were changed to songs of joy — the 137th into the 126th, 
and the wood intended to consume living bodies was burned to 
take away the chills of night. — Edmund Eltinge in Collections of 
Ulster County Historical Society, (Kingston, i860). 



THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. 



185 



Scotland, entered into conflict chanting Psalms, 
with voices which rose far above the din of 
battle. 

And still in our own day, these old Hebrew 
lyrics continue to fulfil their high office as a 
manual of public and private devotion, a stim- 
ulus and a comfort amid all the varied ex- 
periences of human life. As good Bishop Home 
says in a passage of exquisite beauty: "They 
suit mankind in all situations ; grateful as the 
manna which descended from above and con- 
formed itself to every human palate. The 
fairest productions of human wit, after a few 
perusals, like gathered flowers, wither in our 
hands and lose their fragrancy ; but these un- 
fading plants of paradise become, as we are ac- 
customed to them, still more and more beauti- 
ful ; their bloom appears to be daily heighten- 
ed ; fresh odors are emitted, and new sweets ex- 
tracted from them. He who hath once tasted 
their excellencies, will desire to taste them yet 
again ; and he who tastes them oftenest will 
relish them best." In singular agreement with 
these statements of the devout English prelate 
are the utterances of the great German critic, 
Herder: "Not merely as regards the contents, 
but also as regards the form, has this use of the 



186 



THE PSALTER. 



Psalter been a benefit to the spirit and heart of 
men. As in no lyric poet of Greece or Rome, 
do we find so much teaching, consolation, and 
instruction together, so has there scarcely been 
anywhere so rich a variation of tone in every 
kind of song as here. For two thousand years 
have these old Psalms been again and again 
translated and imitated in a variety of ways, and 
still so rich, so comprehensive is their man- 
ner that they are capable of many a new appli- 
cation. They are flowers which vary according 
to each season and each soil, and ever abide in 
the freshness of youth. Precisely because this 
book contains the simplest lyric tones for the 
expression of the most manifold feelings, is it a 
hymn-book for all times/' The words of both 
these eminent men are as true now as when 
first printed more than a century ago. The 
Psalms to-day are read by a million times more 
persons than any other poems in the world, and 
yet their flavor is not exhausted. Greeks and 
Orientals, Romanists and Protestants, Prelatists 
and Puritans, Lutherans and Reformed, men of 
all shades of doctrine and polity, and of all de- 
grees of culture and progress ; the profound 
theologian and the humble believer, the ripe 
Christian and the young convert, the man of 






THE ETHICS OF THE PSALMS. \%y 

elegant taste and the freedman who can just 
spell out the words, alike refresh themselves at 
these living springs. The mightiest productions 
of human genius, the Iliad, the Divina Corn- 
media, the dramas of Shakespeare, are to not a 
few sealed books, but there never yet was in 
any age, a single devout soul which did not find 
in these old Psalms the very best expression of 
its own best experiences. Even Mr. Francis 
Newman, after abandoning the Gospel for the 
Absolute Religion, has to go back to David's 
lyre to find fitting words to express the inward 
yearning of the human heart toward God. 
Having quoted Psalm xlii. i,— 

As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, 
So panteth my soul after thee, O God ! 
My soul is athirst for God, 
Yea, even for the living God, — 

he adds : " Then the soul understands and 
knows that God is her God, dwelling with her 
more closely than any creature can ; yea, 
neither stars nor sea, nor smiling nature hold 
God so intimately as the bosom of the soul. 
All nature is ransacked by the Psalmists for 
metaphors to express this single thought, God 
is for my soul, and my soul is for God. Father, 



1 88 THE PSALTER. 

Brother, Friend, King, Master, Shepherd, Guide, 
are common titles. God is their Tower, their 
Glory, their Ro # ck, their Shield, their Sun, their 
Star, their Joy, their Portion, their Trust, their 
Life." 

Surely a book thus profound and tender, thus 
suited to all lands and ages, thus attested by 
scores of generations, dear to lowly Christians, 
and yet compelling the suffrage of unbelievers, 
always tried and yet never found wanting, as 
eagerly and usefully read to-day in Oregon or 
Oceanica as it was in the hill country of Judah 
before the Trojan war ; such a book must have 
a higher than human origin. 



PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE QUOTED 

OR 

REFERRED TO. 



Exodus, xxi. 23 


. . 170 Ps« 


aim xxxii. . . 






- J 5 


" xxiii. 4 


. 169 ' 


* xxxiii. 6 . 






- 47 


Leviticus, xix. 18 . 


. 169 * 


" 9 • 






. 41 


Deuteronomy, vi. 4 


. . 40 : ' 


1 xxxv. 4-6 






. 166 


" xviii. 1 


I . 134 


' " 12-14 






. 171 


" xxxii. 3 


5 . . 170 < 


1 xxxvi. . . 






15 


Joshua, x. 13 . . 


. 86 ; . 


' xl. 8 . , 






. 163 


2 Samuel, i. 18 . . . 


86, 88 


* xliv. . . 






14 


2 Kings, xix. 15 


. 40 


' xlv. . . . 






119 


Job, xxv. 5 . . . 


. 52 


' xlvii. . . . 






99 


" xxxi. 29, 30 


. 170 ' 


1 ,xlix. . . . 






135 


Psalm i 


. 153 


• 1 


SA 


•> 55, 158 


" ii 


39,117 


' li. 5 • • 




i5>79 


" iv. 6 . . . 


. 94 


1 liii. 1-3 . • 




. 78 


" vi. . . . ic 


, 16, 136 


lviii. 3 . . 






79 


" vii. 4, 5 . . . 


. 171 


1 " 10, 11 . 






172 


" viii. . . . . 


75 


• lx 






14 


" xiii 


. 16 


1 lxvii. . . . 






103 


" xiv. . . . 


. 78 


1 lxviii. . . . 






100 


" XV. ... 


• 155 


1 lxix. 24-27 . 






166 


" xvi. . . . 


• 94, 134 


* lxxi. 22 . . 






5i 


" xvii. . . . 


. 135 


1 lxxii. . . . 






120 


11 xviii. . . . 


. 30, 164 


1 Ixxiii. 24 






136 


44 xix. 12, 13 . 


. . 161 * 


" 25, 26 






96 


" xxii. . . . 


• 54 


* lxxiv. . . 






14 


" xxix. . . . 


. 44 


' Ixxvi. 2 . . 






97 


*' xxx. 9 . . 


. 136 


* lxxix. . . 






14 


" xxxi. . . . 


. . 16 


* lxxxvii. . . 






IOI 



(189) 






190 



PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE. 



Psalm Ixxxviii. 10, 11 . 136 

lxxxix 47 

xc 14, 48 

xciii 120 

xciv 175 

xcv 102 

xcvii 54 

c 3 54 

"5 75 

" 1-3 .... 102 

cii 15, 103 

" 25-27 ... 46 

ciii. 7 97 

" 8, 9, 11 . . 92 

" 10-17 ... 55 

civ 28-30 

cv 68 

cix 167 

ex 39, 122 

cxi. 9 . . . . 
cxv. 1 . . . 

"3 .... 47 
cxix. . . . 161-163 
exxvi 184 



52 
86 



Psalm exxx. . . 

" 2 . 

" exxxv. 6 

" exxxvi. . 

" exxxvii. . 

*• 8,9 

" exxxix. 1-4 



7-10 
17, 18 

21-24 



cxliii. 



" cxlvii. 19, 20 
Isaiah, viii. 19 . 

" xlv. 6 . 

" lx. 1 . , 
Matthew, vii. 20 
Acts, xvii. 28 . 
Romans, iii. 10 
" vii. 22 
" xii. 19 
2 Corinthians, xi. 21 



-31 



15, 80 
180 

42 

55 

184 

167 

50 

5i 

49 

93 

*79 

15 

80, 164 

97 

134 

40 

21 

149 

74 

78 

162 

170 

165 



INDEX 



Apologetics, 4, 1 50. 
Aratus, quotation from, 74. 
Arnold of Rugby on the Imprecations, 168. 
Asaph, his noble Ps., 95, 135. 
Asceticism absent from the Psalter, 1 56. 

Athenians, their claim to be autochthons, 74 ; Moral earnest- 
ness, 84. 
Augustine's famous saying, 94. 
Avatara, the Hindu, 128. 
Avestan, 3, 62, 87, 92, 128, 181. 

Bacon, calls some Pss. " hearse-like,'' 16. 
Books of the Pss., The Five, 13, 14. 
Bryant's Thanatopsis, ignores God, 44. 

Callimachus, his hymns, 58. 

Calvin, on Maccabean Pss., 14 ; on the 139th, 49, 

Church, Dean, on ancient hymns, 83, 182. 

Cleanthes, Hymn of, 68, 74, 

Clement of Alexandria on Egyptian Idolatry, 132, 

Coleridge on Love, 10; on Immortality, 141, 

David, retrospect of life, 30-32 ; Confession of Sin, 79 ; Conflict 

with Saul, 165 ; not vindictive, 170. 
Delitzsch on the 29th Ps., 44. 
Deutch, E., on the Talmud, 62. 
Didactic Pss., 17, 153, 161. 

(191) 



192 



INDEX. 



East India Mutiny, 176. 

Egypt, not the source of Hebrew Poetry, 24 ; its idolatry, 106 ; 

Doctrine of Immortality, 133, 139, 137. 
Eltinge, Edmund, quoted, 184. 
Eternity of God, 47. 
Ethics of the Psalter, not overstrained, 1 56 ; pure, 1 57 ; spiritual, 

160 ; joyful, 161. 
Eusebius on the Martyrs of the Thebaid, 184. 
Ewald, on Maccabean Pss. 15 ; on Hebrew drama, 21 ; on lyric 

poetry, 22 ; on the 53d Ps., 78 ; on the 73d, 96. 

Fijians, their view of Immortality, 132. 

Forgiveness of injuries taught in the Old Testament, 169. 

Froude on Ps. eix., 167. 

Gibbon, on pure morals of the early Church, 1 50. 

Goethe referred to, 26. 

Golden Age, put in the past by heathen, 98 ; in the future by the 

Psalmists, 99, 105. 
Greek Tragedy, its Nemesis, 84. 

Happy Man, The, 153. 

Herder, on the Old Testament, 8 ; on the Pss., 185. 

Hesiod, his Theogony, 58. 

Hesse, Dr. H., on the Imprecations, 168. 

Hindus's Confession of Sin, 81-83. 

Holmes, Dr. O. W., quoted, 176. 

Holiness of God, 51, 83. 

Homeric Hymns, 57, 152. 

Home, Bp., on the Imprecations, 167 ; on the Pss., 185. 

Horsley. Bp., on the Imprecations, 167. 

Human heroes, not found in the Psalter, 88, 115. 

Humboldt on the 104th Ps., 29. 



Ideal Messiah denied, 91. 
Immensity of God asserted, 49. 



INDEX. I93 

Immortality of the Soul, not per se important, 131 ; known to 
the Jews, 133 ; not emphasized, 137 ; a universal tradition or 
belief, 141. 

Imprecations in the Pss., 166. 

Jasher, Book of, its nature, 86-88. 
Jebb, Bp., quoted, 20. 
'Jerome, on use of the Pss., 184. 
Justice of God asserted, 53. 

Lewis, Prof. Tayler, on the Bible as best defence against error, 6. 
Livingstone on Central African beliefs, 133. 
Lowth on Parallelism, 19, 
Lyrics, Nature of, 9, 10, 152. 

Macaulay, Lord, his search for ballads, 23 ; on the India 

Mutiny, 176, 177. 
Man, not the subject of lyric praise, 28, 86, 115. 
Messiah, triumphant, 117 ; suffering, 123; not found elsewhere 

in equal purity, 128. 
Milton, quotation from Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 6 ; from 

his Sonnet on the Vaudois, 174. 
Moliere, 58. 
Monotheism, characteristic of the Pss., 66 ; not a question of 

race, 65. 
Morals of the Psalter, pure, 152; rooted in religion, 154, 

gracious, 156. 
Moses, author of the 90th Ps., 13, 14. 
Muller, Max, on Vedic Hymns, 60 ; on Immortality, 131. 

Necromancers, among the Jews, 134 ; modern, 142. 
Nemesis of Greek Tragedy, 84, 
Newman, Dr. J. H., referred to, 34. 
Newman, Prof. Francis, quoted, 187. 



i 9 4 



INDEX. 



Old Testament, foundation of the New, 8, 151 ; not vindic- 
tive, 169. 
Omnipresence of God, 49. 
Omniscience of God, 50. 
Origin of Man, 74. 
Ovid, 81. 

Palestine, its physical peculiarities, 25. 

Pantheism known to the Psalter, 40. 

Parallelisms in Hebrew Poetry, 19. 

Pascal on man's dignity, yy. 

Pessimism, not found in the Psalter, 91. 

Penitential Pss., 15. 

Poetry of the Psalter, real, 17-21 ; lyrical, 21-23 ; Palestinian, 

24-26 ; true, 27. 
Pindar, contrast with the Psalter, &6. 

Renan on Monotheism, 65. 

Robertson of Brighton, his vindication of Wordsworth, 43. 

Self-righteousness not justly chargeable to the Psalter, 164. 

Soul, its yearning for God, 94, 187. 

Sosiosh, the Persian, 128. 

Spirituality of the Psalter, 11. 

Spontaneity of the Pss., 9. 

Stanley, Dean, on the Imprecations, 167, 

Talmud, 62. 

Taylor, Isaac, on Palestine, 25 ; on mythical heroes, 90. 

Tennyson quoted, Charge, etc., 89 ; Locksley Hall, 104 ; In 

Memoriam, 105, 104. 
Theology of the Psalter, 39, etc. 
Tholuck on the Imprecations, 168. 
Truth of all poetry, 27 ; of the Pss., 28-32. 



INDEX. !gj 

Unity of God, 39, 66-68. 

Varuna's greatness, 61, 62. 

Vedas, Age of, 59; Character, 60; fine sayings of, 61 ; confes- 
sion of sin, 81 ; vagueness, 92 ; earthly, 94. 

Whewell on the 8th Ps., 75. . 
Wordsworth, his pantheistic tendencies, 43. 

Zendic Hymns, elevated, 62 ; Dualistic, 63 ; their Soszosk post 
Biblical, 129. 



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